


Arch-Enemy 101

by erelis



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Interspecies Relationship(s), Interspecies Sex, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-08-05 09:02:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 42,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16364903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erelis/pseuds/erelis
Summary: Adjusting to cohabitating in his own body with a bossy, possessive alien would be difficult enough if his life wasn't a mess, but Eddie's still trying to get his shit together after the last time everything blew up in his face. And to make matters worse, now there's some asshole out there killing innocent people in his—their—city.





	1. Chapter 1

The dog was barking again.

Sighing irritably, Autumn paused the show and got up off the couch. Sidestepping his overstuffed bed in the middle of the room, she traipsed out through the kitchen to the back door. It was the third time in less than an hour that they'd done this song and dance. Gary whined and scratched at the door, demanding to go outside, only to start barking up a storm as soon as she sat back down. After nine hours of tedious drudgery at work, all she wanted to do was watch something mindless on Netflix and unwind.

Opening the door afforded her an unobstructed view of the small back yard and a tiny glimpse of the neighborhood beyond it. Gary was running back and forth along the far end of the fence, hackles raised, barking like he was trying to ward off an army of intruders. But even in the fading light of the evening, she could see that there was nothing there.

No one was walking on the small strip of grass and weeds that filled the area between the end of the property and the next street. There weren't any pedestrians loitering on the sidewalk. And with a chilly edge creeping into the October air, nobody was in the mood to hang out on the porch to visit with friends. As far as she could see, there weren't even any birds or squirrels that might have caught his eye.

“ _Gary!_ ” The huge German Shepherd stopped barking long enough to look up at her. She held the screen door open wide. “Get in here!” He turned his head and stared at nothing for a moment, then bounded across the yard, clambered up the porch stairs, and into the house.

“Would you _please_ behave?” Autumn asked, exasperated, as they returned to the living room.

Gary flopped down onto his bed with a grunt. He watched her for a few seconds as she tentatively sprawled out on the couch, but instead of springing obnoxiously to his feet the moment her butt hit the cushion, he remained where he was and entertained himself with scratching at his face. With wary optimism, Autumn unpaused the show.

It was a reprieve that lasted about fifteen minutes.

Gary sat up, ears pricked forward, and whined. Autumn shot him a warning glare. “Don't you dare.”

He whined again, then heaved himself to his feet and went out into the kitchen. The brief hope that he was just going out for a drink was dashed as the familiar cadence of his toenails tapping against the linoleum started. _Click, click. Click, click._ Round and round he paced, circling the kitchen table. He stopped and pawed at the door, only to resume pacing when she didn't immediately get up to let him out.

Autumn let him complete two more circuits before getting up and stalking over to the door. Yanking it open, she gestured toward the yard. “Go! And shut up this time. Before that asshole next door complains.”

The dog barreled past her and made a beeline to the fence. His hackles rose as he went, though this time, he seemed more interested in sniffing the air and the ground than barking. She lingered there for a few minutes, waiting to see if he'd start making noise or if this might have actually been a need to pee, but he didn't do either of those things. Just patrolled the parameter of the fence, occasionally pausing to scent the air.

Shaking her head, Autumn left him to it. Her parents lived out in Mill Valley. If he continued to be a nuisance, she would drive him out there tomorrow night and let him spend the weekend running around their property. Maybe by Sunday, all of his excess energy or whatever it was would be out of his system and he'd be manageable again.

A flicker of movement at the corner of her eye caught her attention as she reentered the living room, but when she turned her head, she couldn't identify what it might have been. The TV was paused, so it hadn't come from the show, and it wasn’t the curtains because the windows weren't open.

Or were they?

Autumn didn't remember opening them when she got home, but she had been in the middle of a pretty intense phone conversation when she'd walked in the door and it had been sunny enough during the day for the house to get a little stuffy while she'd been at work. Maybe she'd absently cracked them and forgotten she'd done it after the dog drama started.

“I swear,” she muttered to herself, rolling her eyes, as she headed over to the windows. “I have a mind like a sieve these—”

The curtain billowed outward like it was caught in a powerful draft, startling Autumn so badly she almost screamed. She jerked backward, heart pounding, the unvoiced sound still lodged in her throat. An instant later, it tore free as the hulking, inhuman shape emerged from concealment.

She didn't scream for very long.

* * *

**_Eddie. Wake up, Eddie!_ **

Surfacing briefly from the depths of sleep, Eddie groaned in vague, incoherent protest and turned his head, pressing his face into the back of the couch. “Five more minutes...” he mumbled into the cushion.

“ **Eddie!** ” The demand, barked out loud right next to his ear, was accompanied by a slap to the side of his head.

Jolted awake, he sat up so fast that the laptop balanced on his chest fell off onto the floor. “ _Jesus._ I'm awake.” His eyes burned with weariness as he blinked them, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. “What?”

The apartment didn't appear to be on fire. It was too quiet for armed men to be in the process of breaking down his front door. There were no sirens blaring from the street or red and blue flashes of light reflecting off of nearby buildings into the room. It looked like a perfectly normal, uneventful night.

Except for the alien in the room.

Instead of resting invisibly beneath his skin, Venom was a tangible presence in front of him, face fully manifested on an inky tendril that was protruding from his sternum. He was staring at him, his inhuman white eyes and too-sharp mouth managing to convey impatience more clearly than the accompanying sense of emotion being fed directly into his brain. When Eddie met his eyes, he flicked his head toward the side.

“ **Look.** ”

Still entangled in the befuddlement that always accompanied being startled from sleep, Eddie obediently turned his head and stared blankly at the TV. It hadn't been on earlier in the evening. Even bewildered, he recalled that much. Because he'd been working before he'd accidentally fallen asleep—the proof of that was upside-down on the floor—and the noise would have been a distraction. But it was on now, showing some kind of news program.

Eddie shot Venom a sideways glance, feeling only marginally more coherent. “I thought we talked about this.”

Not that he minded his other watching TV without him. It was a harmless way to pass the time and it afforded him opportunities to learn about humanity and the Earth outside of his host's experiences. Sure, there were inevitably a few awkward misconceptions that needed to be corrected after especially _creative_ programming, but overall, it wasn't an issue. The problem was that the adjustment period for the whole body-sharing arrangement was far from over. Many of the things that would have been impossibly strange a month ago were slowly becoming commonplace, but Eddie still wasn't comfortable with the idea of Venom taking his body for a joyride while he was unconscious.

Who knew what the fuck he was doing with it.

“ **Someone was murdered** ,” Venom told him, thoroughly ignoring the halfhearted attempt at chastisement.

Eddie shrugged. “So call the cops.”

Venom's head swung back in his direction. “ **Lazy, Eddie.** ”

“ _Tired_ Eddie,” he corrected, pointedly thinking about how he hadn't had a full night's rest in days.

A ripple of derision passed through Eddie's mind. “ **Eat better**.”

_Easy for you to say._ He arched an eyebrow and volleyed back a sarcastic, “You figure out how to make money out of nothing yet?”

A tendril rose out of his forearm and lifted about a foot into the air. The tip flattened, then fanned out in a fairly accurate approximation of a spread of bills. The color wasn't quite right and the details on each bill were blurry, but Venom's voice was sibilant with smug satisfaction. “ **Yesss.** ”

_Smart-ass._ “It's too late to be a shit,” Eddie told him, pointlessly fighting back a chuckle that he knew Venom could feel anyway.

“ **We should go.** ”

And just like that, they were back to the murder. People were killed almost every other day in San Francisco, yet Venom had never showed this much interest in any of the previous murders that had occurred during their time together. It begged the question _why._

Eddie looked down at his watch. It was 10:35pm. “It's—”

“ **Investigate.** ”

“You know I'm not a detective, right?” he hazarded, wondering if _investigative reporter_ and _detective_ had somehow gotten conflated in the symbiote's understanding.

“ **You investigated Carlton Drake.** ”

“Right, but that's not—”

“ **Investigate this. Get money for writing one of your stories.** ”

“I don't write _stories_. I—”

“ **Bad people did this. Very bad.** ”

And there it was. Eddie frowned. “You're hungry? That's what this is about?”

He hadn't been paying that much attention to what was happening on the TV. In his peripheral vision, he could see flashing emergency lights, people moving around, and panning shots of the interior of a house. Typical network homicide reporting. And since the scene was already crawling with reporters, there was really no reason for him to go out there and get involved too.  

“ ** _Listen_ , Eddie**.”

Abruptly, his head twisted back to face the TV. He opened his mouth, about to remind Venom that they had _definitely_ talked about puppeteering his body when it wasn't an emergency, only to slowly close it again as the station's reporter came back on camera. The woman was passably familiar to Eddie, someone he'd seen on the scene of numerous incidents of varying horror before his second fall from grace and who had always struck him as unflappably calm under pressure. Her expression now was as professionally stoic as ever, betraying nothing of her thoughts, but her skin was far too pale to be a side-effect of the lighting. The reason for that sickly pallor became readily apparent as she gave a recap of the situation.

A body had been found at a townhouse in Candlestick Point earlier in the evening. The victim had been decapitated. Authorities had found the head sitting on the coffee table a few feet from the body, set up like a makeshift macabre jack o'lantern: the top of the skull had been removed, the eyeballs and brain had been scooped out, and a lit candle had been placed inside.

In all his years confronting the worst of humanity and sifting through the detritus of life for answers, Eddie had never heard encountered anything like it. He'd spoken to serial killers and gangbangers, drug addicts and career criminals. He'd seen corpses mutilated in the name of rage and _artistic_ expression. Hell, since bonding with Venom, he'd done his own fair share of mutilation. But this was a level of gruesome that sounded like it came straight out of a horror movie.

There was no denying that his curiosity was piqued. Venom obviously felt it and recognized the win, because he withdrew into Eddie's body without a word. Alert readiness rippled through his mind, spreading restless anticipation down the length of his body.

**_Let's go_** , came a moment later, when Eddie didn't respond by immediately getting up off the couch.

“Just wait a minute.” The victim's house had been crawling with cops and emergency personnel since the discovery of the murder. The killer would be long gone, not conveniently lurking around the bushes so that an alien could temporarily ease his seemingly insatiable hunger. “We need to think about how to handle this.”

**_Think on the way._ **

“You realize that the killer isn't there anymore, right?”

**_Find clues. Use them._ **

Snorting, Eddie picked the laptop off the floor, quickly checked to make sure that it hadn't been damaged in the fall, and set it on the coffee table. “You gotta cut back on the _CSI_ reruns, man.”

He could have explained to him that some of his best exposés took months of work, but Eddie was learning which battles with Venom could be won and which were hopelessly lost before they'd begun. The symbiote wanted to go out tonight. He could either keep dithering until Venom lost patience and took over the body or he could cooperate, maintain control, and hopefully prevent them from getting arrested.

**_No one is arresting us._** A series of graphic images of Venom chowing down on a bevy of police officers followed the matter-of-fact declaration.

“Nope,” Eddie responded immediately, heaving himself off the couch. “We absolutely talked about that. We aren't eating policemen.”

While Venom grumbled in disappointment, he did a quick circuit of the apartment to pick up his notebook from his desk, stuff his feet into a beat-up pair of sneakers, and put on a jacket. Scooping his phone off the counter, he checked to make sure it had enough juice left to take a few pictures if he needed to and shoved it into his jacket pocket.

**_Window?_ **

Although he'd intended to take the bike, the hopefulness of the question gave Eddie pause. It was only about nine miles by conventional transportation. It could be less if they went their own way. And Venom could get something to eat while they were out and about.

He shrugged. “Sure.”

Darkness was already rising to the surface of his skin, sliding over it, encasing and consuming it. With it came the familiar blurring of where Eddie stopped and the symbiote began, _me_ and _you_ melting into an indistinguishable _we_.

One sharp-clawed hand shoved open the window and they leaped out into the chilly air.

* * *

There was still a heavy police presence at the townhouse when they arrived and from the look of things, it didn't appear that the investigation would be wrapping up any time soon. The bulk of the media had called it a night, leaving only a few of the more optimistic reporters with nothing else to do loitering around in the hope of being the first to get news of any important discoveries that the detectives might make. Small clusters of nosy residents and curious onlookers dotted the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, talking quietly amongst themselves, no doubt trading gossip and increasingly implausible conjecture about the situation.

Recognizing that they couldn’t get closer to the house without attracting unwanted attention, Venom receded into their body and left Eddie to unobtrusively mingle with the crowd. He ducked into a convenience store half a block away, purchased a bottle of Coke, and with prop in hand, meandered casually up the sidewalk like he had no idea what was going on.

**_You aren’t going to drink that, are you?_ **

Briefly faltering halfway through opening it, Eddie frowned and then gave the cap a pointed twist that snapped the rest of the plastic threads. That ought to be answer enough.

**_It’s poison. You’re poisoning us, Eddie._ **

Most of the time, Eddie found Venom’s constant presence in his mind kind of... comforting. Having someone to talk to kept the loneliness he liked to pretend he didn’t feel at bay and whether he was willing to admit it or not, his other was actually pretty entertaining. But sometimes, like when he was in public and couldn’t be seen talking to himself like a crazy person, it was really fucking annoying.

_No,_ Eddie thought back, carefully forming the word in his mind and trying to project it as loudly and clearly as he could. _Not. Poison._ And because he wasn’t going to let a bossy alien blob tell him what to do, he took the largest swig of soda he could fit into his mouth.

A distinctly foreign emotion filtered through him, similar to an acute form of secondhand embarrassment. **_Babies speak better than you._**

Babies? He almost choked on his lame act of defiance. What did Venom know about babies? Eddie hadn’t been around any since they’d met and for all that Drake hadn’t had a moral compass, he was almost certain that all of the test subjects the Life Foundation had used with the symbiotes had been adults. _Wait._ Too late, it hit him and the surprise nearly caused him to trip over an uneven crack in the concrete. _You mean_ —

**_Your foul syrup damages our body. I don’t like it._ **

Recognizing that querulous tone as Venom gearing up to single-mindedly bitch about his decisions, Eddie put a pin in his curiosity. He wasn’t going to get any answers out of him when he was like this. Since he had yet to master the art of telepathic communication or whatever the fuck it was and they couldn’t have a proper argument over it without being overhead, Eddie settled for directing a wave of annoyance at him. _Talk. Later._ He waggled the bottle of soda. _Disguise._

Unimpressed. That same weird secondhand embarrassment. Exasperation. Irritation. It was a muddled cocktail of discontent that almost made Eddie reflexively scowl. He caught himself as the muscles around his mouth twitched and forced himself to relax. Thankfully, the gawkers clogging the sidewalk were too busy staring at the house on the other side of the street to notice his jerky facial gymnastics.

“What's going on?” he asked the man standing nearest him, tipping his head in the direction of the commotion.

“Lady got murdered,” the old man replied, radiating the morbid excitement of a person watching a tragedy unfold who had absolutely no connection to those involved. “Looks like the neighbor did it.”

Eddie's eyebrows rose in feigned surprise. “The neighbor?”

“Boyfriend,” a woman corrected authoritatively. “It was the boyfriend.”

The guy shook his head. “Heard it was the neighbor. Something about parking.”

“She had a boyfriend?” the woman's friend chimed in, confused. “I thought she was a lesbian.”

Before long, half a dozen people were arguing about which rumor was actually true and Eddie was thoroughly convinced none of them had any idea what had happened. Leaving them to it, he slipped away and went to eavesdrop on the next cluster of onlookers. He spent a few minutes pretending he wasn't listening to their speculation, then moved on again. After about half an hour of lurking around and asking casual questions, he’d learned nothing legitimate about the situation that the news hadn’t already told him. It didn't sound like anyone actually knew the victim.

**_So talk to the neighbors._ **

Because it was dark and nobody was paying attention to him, Eddie rolled his eyes. If it hadn't been edging ever closer to midnight, of course he would have knocked on a few doors. But he assumed that the neighbors were trying their best to salvage what sleep they could from the night and wouldn't appreciate the disturbance.

_Tomorrow_ , he thought back at Venom. _Come back. Talk. Tomorrow._

**_Then why are we still here? I'm bored. And hungry._ **

For a higher form of sentient life, Venom could be an enormous asshole when he wanted to be. Eddie would've been a little impressed if he hadn't wanted to wring his nonexistent neck. _You were the one who wanted to come out here in the first place!_ He would've yelled it at him if there hadn't been people around. Because there was, he had to hope that the aggravated thought had been clear enough for Venom to understand.

**_Feed me, Eddie._ **

Venom wasn't the only one who could be a miserable shit. “Yeah, okay, Audrey Two,” he muttered under his breath, hiding his mouth behind the Coke bottle.

**_What?_** A current of too sharp curiosity shot through his mind. **_Who is that?_**

Smugly ignoring him, Eddie took another huge gulp of soda just to be a dick and headed toward the outskirts of the crowd. The curiosity shifted into irritated jealousy.

**_Don't ignore me. Who is that?_ **

Three weeks ago, Eddie would have been too terrified to openly antagonize something with so many teeth and a penchant for eating people that pissed it off. But now, instead of feeling alarmed by the growing swell of anger, he was perversely amused by it and interested to see how far he could push until Venom's patience finally snapped.

So he didn't answer and kept his mind unhelpfully blank as crowd and crime scene slowly receded behind him. Even when the sidewalk emptied of pedestrians and he could have spoken out loud without anyone overhearing him, he kept his mouth shut. Until Venom's growing frustration got to be too much temptation to resist needling just a tiny bit more. He started humming a bright, lively tune.

There it was. The strange there and gone sensation of Venom rifling through his memories for an explanation. A moment later, a tendril poked up out of his jacket collar and twisted toward his face, thickening and shifting until it grew wickedly sharp teeth, pearlescent eyes, and a widely grinning mouth.

Without even trying, he looked enough like the man-eating plant in question to make Eddie chuckle. And then, belatedly remembering that they were still out in a public place, he slapped ineffectually at the tendril. “Go away before someone sees you!”

“ ** _I would never eat you, Eddie_** ,” Venom murmured in his ear, the low predatory tone at odds with the attempted reassurance.

Eddie snorted and shoved at him again. “Sure, yeah. Okay. You just threaten to eat my organs on a regular basis.”

He finally took the hint and slithered back into Eddie's chest. Just in time for a couple to walk obliviously past them. **_Everyone else is another story._**

Knowing that the comments were going to get more graphic and pointed the longer he delayed in finding something suitable for Venom to eat, Eddie took a right turn down a darkened side-street, eschewing the well-lit, safer route for a more isolated and dangerous one. He would find a takeout place that was still open or some small-time criminal would accost him; either way, his other would eat and quit bothering him about it for a while.

The world being what it was, they weren't even halfway back to North Beach before a guy peeled himself out of the shadow of a stinking alley and waved a gun in Eddie's face. Venom ate him before he finished making demands, then hung around and got them the rest of the way home. He relinquished control of their body once the apartment door closed, leaving Eddie standing in the middle of the tiny kitchen.

Bracing himself for the inevitable unpleasantness, he passed his tongue over his teeth and took an experimental swallow, but there was no trace of the late mugger left behind between his molars and the coppery aftertaste of blood and tissue was almost nonexistent this time.

A tiny smile played at the corner of his mouth as he turned on the tap and filled a glass with some water. “Thanks.”

**_You're welcome._** Contentment radiated out from those two words, a mixture of sated hunger and appreciation for the acknowledgement of his attempt at being considerate.

Although there wasn’t any lingering taste of hapless thug fouling up his mouth, Eddie could still remember every grotesque second Venom— _they_ —had spent consuming him. The only way he could effectively exorcise the memory was by sloshing a mouthful of water around and spitting it out in the sink. As he straightened up, he felt the odd sensation he'd come to identify as the mental equivalent of eye rolling that Venom exuded whenever he thought his host was being an idiot.

Refusing to let a blob of goo make him feel stupid for being weirded out about _eating people_ , Eddie headed into the bathroom. “We'll go back in the morning and see if we can talk to the neighbors,” he said, pointedly putting an excessively large dollop of toothpaste onto his toothbrush.

**_We?_ **

An image of them standing on the sidewalk in the bright light of day, towering over a terrified-looking human with notebook and pen in one clawed hand, accompanied that amused question. It was so ridiculous that Eddie laughed in the middle of vigorously brushing his teeth and promptly choked on a mouthful of toothpaste foam. Spitting out what hadn’t gone the wrong way down his throat, he hunched over the sink and struggled to breathe through a fit of coughing while the sense of Venom oh-so-innocently watching him suffer grew stronger.

_Asshole_. Already weak, the condemnation was ruined when he stood up, caught sight of himself in the mirror, and couldn't suppress a chuckle. “ _I'll_ talk to the neighbors,” he amended, wiping at his eyes. “ _You_ keep an eye out for anything suspicious.”

**_Being a reporter is a “we thing” now?_ **

He paused in the middle of rinsing out the sink to give the question due consideration. “Do you want it to be?”

**_Can we eat our sources when they disappoint us?_ **

“No.”

Finishing up with the cleaning, Eddie shucked off his clothes and stepped into the shower. He'd already taken one earlier that night, but between wandering the city streets for a few hours and feeding his symbiote, he needed to wash the literal and metaphorical grime off before he went to bed.

**_Can we frighten them for information?_ **

The proper, professional answer was _no_. Eddie knew that. He also knew how frustrating people could be and how his frustration quickly exacerbated Venom's impatience. He turned the hot water up as high as it would go, which wasn't as scalding in this shitty building as the nozzle suggested, and ducked under the spray. “Maybe? We can play it by ear.” 

He felt Venom moving under his skin, twisting and coiling around his shoulders. Thinking it over, maybe, or just positioning himself to briefly rise to the surface and partake in the shower too before the hot water petered out. Eddie let him be and focused on lathering himself up with a bar of cheap soap, only slightly failing not to think about the good old days when the hot water lasted for the duration of a shower, the water pressure was so strong that it felt a little like getting a massage, and the soap didn't make his skin feel weirdly tacky.

As he was getting out of the shower, Venom roused himself from whatever he'd been doing and offered quietly, **_We can try_**.

“Yeah, okay. Sure.” Eddie gave himself a quick rub-down with a threadbare towel, tossed it half-assedly over the shower curtain rod to dry, and left the bathroom in search of clothes. “We can swing by the Wharf, after. Get some fresh sushi for lunch. My treat. I've still got a little money left from that Kasady interview.”

And if he was a responsible adult, he would squirrel it away in a savings account for the next time he was really hurting for cash. But things were decent right now. He had a semi-steady job and splurging on food here and there would keep Venom happy and less inclined to eat everybody else.

**_How fresh?_ **

Eddie thought about it as he put on his pajamas, knowing if he didn't try to establish some boundaries at the outset he'd end up in another revolting lobster situation. “Fresh as I can stomach?” he offered as he turned off the lights.

**_Deal._ **

It was nice when they managed to compromise like this. And yeah, sure, maybe it was because Venom had just eaten two hundred pounds of fatty human _—_ Eddie grimaced as the unwanted TMI bubbled up in his mind and promptly banished it back to the darkness where it belonged _—_ and wasn't starving, but a compromise was compromise. He wasn't going to argue with it.

Getting into bed, Eddie flopped over onto his stomach, groped around until he got a handful of blankets and sheet, and hauled the whole mess haphazardly up to his shoulders. It wasn't the best mattress in the world—he'd gotten the cheapest one he could find after Anne had kicked him out, unable to afford anything better with no immediate prospects for a job and a savings account that wasn't going to stretch very far—but it was better than sleeping on the floor, and once he was laying down, the exhaustion he'd been staving off the last few days quickly crept over him.

“Please don't wake me up,” he mumbled into the pillow. “Not unless it's life or death.” Was that clear enough? Probably not. Because leaving things too loosely defined was practically asking for Venom to take unwanted liberties, he shoved sleep off for a few more seconds to add, “ _Ours_.”

**_Sleep, Eddie._ **

There was something there. Some tone that probably meant something important. Unfortunately, Eddie was too tired to puzzle it out. He just barely registered it, but before he could muster the wherewithal to chase it down, he drifted off into the darkness.

* * *

After weeks of being jolted awake by the alarm, obnoxious racket from next door, or lately, an alien's endless stream of insistent demands and snarky comments, waking up gradually to a sunlight-filled apartment and extraordinarily rare silence felt like accidentally falling ass-backwards into heaven. Superstitious paranoia kept Eddie laying there motionless for a good five minutes, hardly daring to breathe lest any overt signs of life encourage a spontaneous disaster to ruin the peaceful morning. Even Venom seemed to be cutting him a break.

No impatient voice growled at him to get up and go make breakfast. No tendrils of smooth, extraterrestrial goo poked or prodded at him or attempted to forcibly drag him out of bed. No nightmarish face invaded his personal space to stare critically at him, mere inches from his face.

It was like waking up alone without the echoing empty sense of actually _being_ alone.

He still didn't know if Venom slept. He'd asked a few times, but the answers he'd gotten were inconclusive at best and dismissively insulting to humanity at worst. The frustrating non-answers and circular conversations led Eddie to chalk up sleeping as a firm _maybe_ , right next to practically everything else he wanted to know about his other.

Maybe Venom was sleeping now. Maybe he was doing the symbiote equivalent of resting. Or hell, maybe he was just deep in thought or lost in some kind of slimy, blood-drenched fantasy that was incomprehensible to the human brain. Whatever it was, he wasn't pestering him.

Didn't seem to be paying attention to him, either.

That realization washed over Eddie like a delightfully cool breeze on a hot, sticky day, prickling his skin and stirring up a faint flare of arousal deep in his gut. In the six months following his breakup with Anne, his sex life had consisted of nothing more titillating than his hand. Then he'd broken into the Life Foundation and even that meager source of pleasure had disappeared, smothered by self-consciousness and the awkward embarrassment he knew that he would've felt trying to jerk off with a chatty, judgmental audience.

He probably could've talked to Venom about it—he wasn't completely unreasonable, especially after a large meal—but trying to surreptitiously imagine that happening always led to dismissing the idea as more trouble than it was worth. Even in the best of moods, _me_ _versus_ _we_ tended to be a volatile subject. The few concessions that Venom made to Eddie-only time had to be reserved for important things, like maintaining gainful employment so they had a place to live and enough food to eat. Plus, there wasn't any dignified or comfortable way to have that conversation. It was just easier to ignore the problem and hope that eventually either it would sort itself out or Venom would chill the hell out.

Right now, though, right _now_ , Eddie had some unexpected private time.

Moving slowly, careful not to do anything that might draw Venom’s attention, Eddie slid a hand down his stomach and pushed at the waistband of his pajama pants, easing them a few inches down his thighs. His dick, semi-hard already, got harder as he felt his heart start to beat faster with the subtle thrill of trying to do something without getting caught. _I am so fucked up_. So _fucked up._ But that didn’t make his growing erection flag and it certainly didn’t stop him from wrapping his fingers around his cock.

It felt so good, just that simple touch after so long without it, that he almost moaned with the pleasure of it. _Almost._ At the last second, he remembered that he had to be quiet, that he couldn’t interrupt whatever was keeping Venom occupied, and pressed his lips together, stifling the sound. He would have liked to have been able to take his time, really savor breaking the forced abstinence by making it last, but he didn’t know how long he had to get this done. And as his palm slid down his shaft, sending a rush of pleasure and heat through his body, impatience took over.

Tightening his fingers around his cock until _good_ sharpened to _great_ , Eddie set a quick pace, pumping his fist swiftly along the shaft. He closed his eyes a moment later, giving himself over to the gradually building pleasure. His hips twitched upward, pushing into the downstroke of his fist. It felt so fucking good. Of course it did. He did it again.

And again. 

**_What are you doing?_ **

Eddie’s eyes snapped open as his hand froze, the groan of frustration catching in his throat as his whole body went rigid. Stupidly, he even held his breath. Like if he kept still and didn’t respond, Venom wouldn’t see what he was doing and lose interest.

**_Eddie? Your pulse is racing._ **

“Uh,” Eddie croaked, then wet his dry lips and cleared his throat. “It’s ah, I’m—” Darkness was rising through his t-shirt, coalescing into an elongating blob. “No, don’t—”

Too late. Venom had already formed a face, giving Eddie the view of the back of what passed for his head. A tendril emerged from his chest and plucked at the blankets, lifting them up out of the way. “ **Let me see.** ”

He still had his dick in his hand, but the other one was free. Eddie latched onto the sheet with it and hung on, automatically, irrationally, fighting to keep himself covered. “Don’t need an audience, buddy.”

Venom was stronger. He could also override Eddie’s fine motor control. As his fingers went slack against his will, the sheet was yanked down. He could only watch as Venom’s head tipped sideways, considering the tableau.

“ **What is the purpose of this?** ”

Eddie was tempted to suffocate himself with the pillow, though he couldn’t tell if it was the lingering shame of getting caught or sexual frustration that made the thought so tempting. “There’s not—” He sighed in defeat. “It just feels good.”

“ **Hm**.”

That hum was so unhelpfully noncommittal that Eddie had no idea how he was supposed to interpret it and the emotional whiplash of arousal-turned-embarrassment wasn’t making anything clearer. He stared at Venom and Venom stared at his hand still curled around his dick. Neither of them moved.

Eventually, the heavy sense of expectant anticipation got too strong for Eddie to ignore.

Right. Okay. They were apparently doing this. Eddie gave it a few seconds of distracted thought, then bowed to the inevitable. _Fuck it. Why not?_ It wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d ever done. Or the most embarrassing, truthfully. And despite the interruption, his erection was still mostly intact.

Venom was _right there_ , though. “Uh, okay. Can you just—Can you not do that?”

“ **What?** ”

“Watch.” _Why does stupid shit like this always happen to me?_ “It’s—” He flapped his free hand at his chest. “Look, just go inside.”

Instead of slithering back into his body like a polite goo-glob, Venom’s head twisted around and gave him a look that somehow managed to convey dryly amused derision even without eyebrows. “ **What difference does it make? I can still see you.** ”

“I know, but it’s just—You’re like, right there.” Venom wasn’t budging. “And this is a private—Humans, decent respectable humans, don’t do this in public.”

“ **We aren’t in public.** ”

“It kinda is, actually. More than—”

“ **Do you think I wasn’t watching when you started doing this?** ”

It was like getting doused in cold water. Shockingly cold water that startled him. Made him feel chillingly exposed and hypersensitive. And inexplicably, impossibly, _embarrassingly_ , it made him harder, too. What he wouldn’t have given for a good old-fashioned spontaneous disaster right about then to get him out of this mess. “Oh god.”

“ **Do you want me to do it for you?** ”

Eddie flinched, all but yelping a horrified, “ _No!”_

“ **Then stop stalling.** ”

Being threatened into jerking off by a nosy, voyeuristic alien should’ve killed the possibility of thinking about anything even tangentially related to sex for at least a year. But he was still hard, he still wanted to get off, and— _Oh fuck, no!_ —tendrils were starting to rise from his hips in what was obviously a warning.

“Okay! Okay! _Jesus_.”

Hysterically feeling like the world’s biggest jackass, Eddie gave himself a pull from the base of his cock to the tip, paused just for a second, then pushed his hand back down again. By the time he completed the pass, he was back to full hardness. And if he was being honest with himself, it felt just as good as it had when Venom hadn’t been overtly watching. Maybe a little better.

“ **Do it again.** ”

The self-consciousness started to creep back in. “Okay, FYI, I don’t need a backseat…” He trailed off, brain and mouth stalling out on an appropriate noun with which to finish that sentence.

“ ** _Eddie._** ”

That one dark, velvety growl of impatience made arousal tear through him faster than it ever had in his life. It ripped the breath from his lungs with an audible gasp, flooded him with so much lust that his stomach clenched. His hand jerked, sending frissons of pleasure up his shaft that he immediately chased by turning the motion into long, even strokes.

“ **This is nice.** ”

Nice was an understatement. It felt fantastic. Better than it had before. Like Venom taking an active interest was amplifying the intensity of it, creating an endlessly spiraling feedback loop of sensation. Eddie hummed a note of agreement before finding his voice. “I know.”

“ **Go faster.** ”

_Jesus Christ._ His hips jerked involuntarily at the demand, shoving his cock deeper into his fist. That _really_ shouldn’t have been as erotic as it was. But god help him, it was. He swallowed thickly, his throat feeling parched. He wanted to explain that if he went any faster, it’d be over way too soon, but all he could manage to get out of his mouth was one word, just this side of a grunt. “No.”

Venom growled in irritation, momentarily wiping Eddie’s mind of the capacity for coherent thought. “ **Yes.** ”

_Do you mind?_ He thought it or said it or thought it and tried to say it. He wasn’t sure, but Venom understood it anyway.

“ ** _Yes_**.” His hand picked up speed, didn’t react at all when Eddie tried to get it to ease up. “ **Let me try.** ”

He could’ve maybe tried to fight it, or at least protest the manhandling, but he didn’t bother. Venom obviously wasn’t going to listen to him and quite frankly, Eddie was enjoying it too much to remember why he’d been so against the idea before. So he gave up, sank back onto the mattress, and closed his eyes, content to just go along for the ride.

And what a bizarre, intoxicatingly erotic ride it was. Half a year being lonely and depressed meant that he was intimately acquainted with his hands. Every callus, every crack and spot of dry skin. But as familiar as it was, as it should have been, this was a completely foreign touch all the same. The tightness of the grip, the speed of the pace, the intent behind every flex of muscle—none of it was _him_ and that should have freaked him out. But it didn’t.

Caught in the rush of it, careening toward an orgasm and wholly unable to slow it down, Eddie’s thoughts drifted unintentionally to Venom and what it would feel like if it wasn’t his hand touching his cock but _theirs_ , strong and powerful, covered in darkness and tipped in claws. He came so hard so fast that it felt like everything stopped and nothing existed but a mind-numbing explosion of white-hot pleasure that went on and on and—

“ **What is this?** ”

Somehow, Eddie managed to pull himself together and figure out how to get his eyes open before the question was repeated. One glance downward and he wanted to shut them again. His hand was in the air, streaked with come, and Venom was leaning toward it, peering at it curiously like he’d discovered an incomprehensible yet utterly fascinating oddity.

Groaning, Eddie slumped back down. “You’re killing the afterglow here, man.”

Something touched his skin. Even though he knew better, Eddie warily opened an eye and saw Venom touching the tip of his tongue to a particularly large wet spot. A moment later, it slid along his palm, warm and hot, and lapped the whole mess up.

“...Fuck's sake.” Groaning, he threw his other arm over his face, not wanting to define the reason for his stomach clenching and twisting itself into knots. He'd already sailed so far beyond the boundaries of his comfort zone with this that he didn't know where he was. He wasn't ready to examine the details. Not yet.

Of course, Venom apparently didn't share his confusion or uncertainty. “ **We should do this again.** ”

Eddie really didn't want to think about _again_. “Later,” he muttered, temporizing, hoping he could keep Venom distracted enough to forget about it until he was mentally and emotionally ready to do a little soul-searching first.

“ **Now.** ”

Emerging from faux-hiding, he let his arm fall back onto the bed and shook his head. _Thank fuck for human biology._ “It doesn't really work like...”

His cock should've been soft by now. He was pretty sure that it had been a moment ago. But it was thickening as he watched, lengthening back to a full erection that should have been impossible.

“...Oh.”

There were a dozen protests he could make that would undoubtedly fall on deaf ears. Venom was already maneuvering Eddie's hand back to his dick with disturbing enthusiasm, like he'd just found a new toy to play with and couldn't get enough of it. But he was also radiating such a strong sense of curiosity and enjoyment that Eddie, for all his misgivings, couldn't quite talk himself into ruining the symbiote's fun. And it wasn't like he wouldn't benefit from it.

“Hey.” Something about his voice must have penetrated Venom's casual disregard for his impending sexual-identity crisis, because his fingers paused a hairsbreadth from his skin. “Once more, okay? Then we really have to get up and do some work.” And then, only feeling a _little_ guilty for the manipulation, he threw in, “And eat.”

“ **Deal.** ”

That strange-familiar touch enveloped his cock again. Exhaling a breathy almost-chuckle, Eddie slumped back on the mattress, shoved all of the conflicting thoughts and emotions out of his head, and let himself enjoy it.


	2. Chapter 2

Although breaking up with Anne ranked as one of the worst things that had ever happened to him, the subsequent awkwardness of trying to have adult conversations with her without humiliating himself more than he already did on a semi-regular basis taught him a very valuable skill that he could use in a variety of situations. With the notable exception of those first few disastrous days following the break-in at the Life Foundation, Eddie could slap a relatively professional expression on his face and comport himself with a believable amount of dignity and composure, regardless of whatever crisis might be wreaking havoc with his life. He couldn't maintain it indefinitely, but in public, when he had to talk to people for the purposes of employment or interpersonal equilibrium, he could usually manage to function.

Interviewing neighbors who might have unknowingly witnessed a murder wasn't quite as traumatic a challenge as trying to move his shit out of their— _Anne's_ apartment without turning into a pathetically sniveling mess and begging her to take him back, but Eddie was sort of in the middle of an emotional melt—in the middle of a _complicated_ _personal_ _issue_ that was trying to intrude on his thoughts and exacerbated by the presence of Venom actually intruding whenever a stray one managed to get through his stubborn refusal to deal with any of it.

"So you haven't been home at all lately?"

The middle-aged man who owned the house at the end of the street shook his head. "My daughter in San Diego just had a baby on Sunday. I've been staying with her for the past week, helping out. Just got in two hours ago."

Eddie crossed the man's address off his list. "And before that, you didn't see anything unusual happening in the neighborhood? No fights? Nobody new move in? Strange cars parked where they shouldn't be?"

He shook his head. "No, sir. This is a pretty quiet street. Couple families, some elderly folks, a few singles. Hasn't been a property for sale for about a year and a half."

"All right." Making a note of that, Eddie flipped to a clean sheet of paper and scribbled down his phone number. "Thanks for your time. And hey, if you hear anything, from the neighbors or anybody—" He tore out the number and passed it over. "—give me a call."

The man took the number and Eddie headed off down the sidewalk to the next house. There was no answer there when he rang the bell and none at the next, though whether that was because the residents were at work or were afraid he was there to murder them was impossible to determine.

**_I could eat them_ ** **.**

Eddie snorted in amusement. "You can always eat," he murmured into the collar of his jacket, tactically turned up to mask the movement of his mouth.

**_We should have had a larger breakfast._ **

"You had enough." Six sloppily made pancakes the size of the biggest skillet he owned, an entire package of bacon, and half a box of microwavable breakfast sausages. Eddie had eaten two of the pancakes, a strip of bacon, and then had let Venom take over to eat the rest of it. "What else did you want?"

Strangely thoughtful silence settled heavily over Eddie's mind for a moment, like Venom was gravely considering the question. It probably shouldn't have been that surprising. He'd asked about food and Venom _always_ took eating seriously.      

**_More of you._ **

He put his foot down wrong, caught the edge of his shoe in a broken crack in the concrete, and stumbled, twisting his ankle and nearly pitching himself gracelessly off the sidewalk. Venom caught him, yanking him back before he could take the spill, and stitched up the damaged muscle before he could fully register the pain.

"What—Are you—" Flustered exasperation and guilty mortification tangled up somewhere between his chest and his throat, choking off his spluttering attempt at a rebuttal.

**_What's the problem? We enjoyed it._ **

"We are _not_ talking about this right now," Eddie hissed, stuffing his hands into his jacket pockets before he could give in to the impulse to wave them around. It wouldn’t have helped underscore his refusal to have the conversation—everything in him was already violently recoiling from the subject and that would have more impact on Venom than pointless gestures—but psychologically, it would have made him feel a little better. "Concentrate on what we're doing." _Before someone sees me acting like a lunatic and calls the cops._

**_No one would mistake someone as clumsy as you for the killer._ **

Eddie couldn't tell if that was meant as reassurance, criticism, or a roundabout way to say that the comment had been deliberately designed to fluster him and make him look like enough of an idiot to dispel possible suspicions. He doubted it was the latter. Venom wasn't that subtle. Plus, that level of manipulation probably required greater comprehension of the nuances of human behavior and psychology than he possessed. And because his other sounded miffed, he figured it was unlikely that it was meant to make him feel better.

But Venom did have a point. Only an incompetent fool would return to the scene of his crime in broad daylight and make a spectacle of himself flailing around. If anyone was watching from the safety of their home, his antics might have just set them at ease.

Not that it made Venom pestering him about earlier any better. 

Firmly focusing his mind on Interviewing The Neighbors, Eddie finished the walk to the house beside the victim's home without further incident and rang the bell. The seconds ticked by with no response, but just as he was turning to continue on, the door slid open a crack.

"Can I help you?" a woman's voice cautiously asked from inside.

Turning back, Eddie carefully maintained a nonthreatening distance and offered her a benignly friendly smile. "Sorry to bother you, ma'am. I'm Eddie Brock. A reporter." He casually lifted his hands so that it was apparent they were empty but for the notebook and pen. "I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about what happened here last night."

"A reporter?"

"Yeah, I—" Having his old MNBN network affiliation to throw in behind his name sure would've come in handy right about then. Eddie shrugged sheepishly. "I'm a freelance journalist now." He tipped his head toward his shoulder and jerked his thumb backward. "My ID's in my pocket. I can get it if—"

"You said Eddie Brock?"

"Yeah," Eddie nodded, hoping the recognition in her voice wasn't a bad thing. These days, he never knew. "From—"

The door opened further and the woman stepped out onto the little uncovered porch. She looked a little younger than him, late thirties maybe, and was casually dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt. Calm and unafraid of the strange man on her doorstep, he realized, as she met his eyes.

" _The Brock Report_ , yeah. I used to watch it." A tiny smile turned up the corner of her mouth. "It was nice to hear an honest account of what was going on in the world without the usual bullshit."

That startled a bark of genuine laughter out of him, and in response, her smile grew a little more pronounced. “Probably why they fired me,” he conceded, and things had changed enough in his life that the note of humor that suffused his voice as he said it wasn't feigned.

"Their loss."

He smiled, ducking his head slightly in acceptance of the compliment. "Kind of you to say so."

She flashed another smile, then glanced toward the house next door. "You want to know what happened to Autumn, right?"

Eddie nodded. "Were you home last night?"

"Yeah. All night. I was the one who called the police."

"You were?" Eyebrows rising in surprise, he quickly flipped to a blank sheet of paper. "Can you tell me what happened? What you saw or heard or...or anything?"

Shoving her hands into her pockets, she glanced again at the other house. A slight frown thinned her lips. "I didn't really see anything. Didn't know anything was happening until the screaming started."

"Do you remember around what time it was?"

"Maybe six thirty? Close to there. It was just starting to get dark." She looked at him. "Autumn usually gets— _got_ home around four in the afternoon. Always took her dog for a walk right away. I didn't see her doing it yesterday, but I knew she was home. I could hear her out in the backyard with the dog."

It was too soon to tell if any of those details mattered, but Eddie jotted them down anyway. "Anything unusual about that?"

"I don't know, actually. The dog was barking a lot. And I mean a _lot_. Angry barking, you know, like he saw something. But that dog's a little..."

"What?"

" _Off_ , I guess." She shook her head, like she was still struggling to find the right word to describe it. "Mentally. Something happened to him when he was a puppy. Autumn told me about it once, back when she got him, but I don't remember what it was. Doesn't really matter. He was barking and I could hear her outside yelling at him to be quiet. She didn't sound concerned. Not about whatever he was barking at. More annoyed, you know? Like he was misbehaving."

Could be something. Might not be. Eddie wrote it down just to be safe. "Did you see any of this or just hear it?"

"I heard it while I was making dinner." Withdrawing a hand from her pocket, she gestured back at her door. "My kitchen window looks out into the back, but there's a fence between my yard and hers. It's about, I don't know, six feet tall? Solid panels. I can't see over there."

"You have any idea how long this went on?"

"Off and on until I heard her screaming."

He made another note. "And what was—" This was awkward. He winced in sympathy. "Sorry, I have to ask. Was it, the screaming, did it sound like she was saying anything?"

She looked a little paler than she had a moment ago, but she didn't flinch away from it. "No. It was, I don't know how to describe it. Just a sound. Loud. Terrified. Like you hear in horror movies. Only lasted a few seconds. I called the police immediately. Ran upstairs, away from the front door, and watched for them out the bedroom window."

Eddie glanced upward and saw two windows on the floor above him. "Is that—" He pointed up at them. "One of those?"

The woman nodded. "That one. Right above us."

"Okay," he muttered, flipping to a new page and scribbling a few more lines of information. "And while you were up there, did you see anything? People on the street that might have come from next door? Cars drive by?"

"No," she replied with certainty. "Nothing until the police came."

He pointed the end of his pen at the woman's house. "You have a back door?" He repeated the gesture at the victim's house. "Did she?"

"Yeah. The houses on this street are all kind of laid out the same. The back door's in the kitchen. Leads out to the yard."

"So whoever did it probably went out the back," Eddie murmured, adding that to his notes. Something was itching at his brain. Some detail he was overlooking. _What am I missing?_ "And when you were in the kitchen, you didn’t look out the window and notice anything outside that struck you as unusual? No, I don’t know, damage to the fence or anything like that?"

"Nothing." She sounded apologetic about it. "I've been thinking about it all morning, trying to remember if I saw or heard something more and just didn't realize it. But I can't think of anything."

The sense that he was missing something obvious got stronger and more irritating. Eddie looked down at his notepad, hoping whatever it was would jump out at him. _Timeframe. Dog barking. Neighbor screaming. Nobody visibly exits the front of the house._ He could feel himself frowning at the paper, like it was to blame for his unhelpfully blank mind, and forced his face to relax. _Timeframe. Dog barking. Neighbor scr_ —

**_The dog. The dog knows._ **

"What?" Eddie lifted his eyes in surprise as the meaning behind Venom’s interruption crashed into his mind with all the subtlety of a landslide. The woman was watching him curiously. _Shit._ He cleared his throat. "What happened to the dog?"

"The dog?" she echoed, eyebrows rising, before looking at the house. "I... I don't..."

"Was the dog killed too? Do you know?"

He watched as her face scrunched up in thought. After a moment, she shook her head. "No. I don't think so. They would've brought the body out, right? I watched for a while.” She pointed to the side, where a window on the ground floor looked out onto the street. “Saw them take her away. I didn’t see them take out anything the size of the dog.”

“What kind of dog are we talking about here? A little dog?”

“German Shepherd. Couple years old.”

“So a—that’s a pretty big dog.” Loud, too. Intelligent. Protective. Eddie hadn’t ever had one, but they weren't used as police dogs because they were stupid or lazy. Even if the victim's had some kind of health issue, it would've realized that its owner was getting hurt. Probably would've been going ballistic. "Did you hear it barking during the attack? Or when the police showed up?"

She thought about it in silence for a few seconds. "Hm, no. I don't think so."

"And when you were watching the police and ambulances arrive, you didn't see anyone taking the dog out of the house on a leash?"

"Not that I remember. Why?"

Eddie lifted one shoulder in a sloppy shrug. "Oh, you know how it is. Any time something tragic happens and there are animals involved, people always want to know what happened to them." He gave her the lopsided, slightly conspiratorial grin that had charmed Anne on more than one occasion, once upon a time. "And most reporters, they don't follow up on that."

A smile crossed the woman's mouth. "Maybe that's what makes you special, Mister Brock."

"Oh, I don't know," Eddie demurred with a chuckle, shaking his head. "I'm not special." Not in the way she meant. Not unless she knew about the alien shifting restlessly underneath his skin.

"You sure about that?" she challenged gently.

**_Eddie..._ **

Despite the accusations Venom liked to throw around whenever he was feeling irritable, Eddie wasn't a complete idiot. He recognized the subtle shift in their conversation from casually friendly to flirtatious. Unlike his other, however, he just didn't object to it. Kinda enjoyed it, actually.

It’d been a long time since someone had looked at him with even a little interest. And for good reason. He’d been a mess after Anne, alternating between drunk and sleep deprived more than he’d been sober, not eating properly, barely taking care of himself, and generally schlepping around the city like he was waiting to be put out of his misery. Eddie hadn’t been able to stand himself. It was no wonder no one else could, either.

Now though, with his shit somewhat clumsily stitched halfway together, yeah, it was nice to have a pretty lady smile at him and say nice things about him. Even if he knew she’d change her tune if she ever got to know him. Even if he knew he couldn’t ever let her do that in the first place. Or anyone, truthfully. Not anymore.

Not with Venom entwined with his life.

But that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a _little_ bit of completely harmless fun. Just for a few minutes.

“I think _unconventional_ might be more accurate,” he returned honestly, flashing a mischievous half-smile that said he knew full well that the proper term wasn’t _special_ or _unconventional_.

**_I don’t like this,_** came a dark, disgruntled growl. **_I don’t like_ her.**

Unaware that she was inadvertently encroaching on territory already jealously guarded, the woman shrugged, brushing off the less than complimentary undercurrent of his statement. "Conventional’s overrated anyway."

Something thick rippled over Eddie's ribs and up his spine. Another slithered along his shoulders, prickling the hair at the nape of his neck. His mind filled with the image of malevolently gleaming eyes and too many sharp teeth. **_We should eat her._**

_No_ , he thought back as hard as he could. _No eating witnesses._ The discontent roiling through his mind and body didn't abate, leaving him with no idea if he'd managed to communicate that clearly enough or if Venom was simply ignoring him. And because the symbiote wasn't calming down, he knew he had to get out of there before something unfortunate happened.

"Hey, listen, uh..." he trailed off uncertainly.

"Heather," the woman supplied easily.

"Heather." He smiled, friendly instead of flirtatious, hoping that Venom would pick up on the difference and settle down. "Nice to meet you." He quickly wrote his phone number on a blank piece of paper, tore it out, and handed it to her. "Sorry I don't have business cards, still getting used to the whole freelance thing, but here, if you think of anything else or you hear anything that might help me identify whoever did this, call me. Day or night, okay?"

"Sure," she replied, taking the slip of paper with a nod. "I'll—Actually, you know, the last time I heard the dog barking, it was _before_ the screaming started. He'd been out back then. I don't know if she ever brought him back inside. He might've been out there when she was murdered." 

"You mentioned a fence earlier. Is it possible he could've gotten out in the chaos?"

"Yeah, I mean, it's possible. The fences back there are fairly old. And he's a big dog. If he jumped against the gate hard enough..." She gestured over her shoulder at the house. "The property goes almost all the way to the other road. You can get a clear view up the back from the sidewalk."

"I will check that out before I leave," Eddie promised, snapping his notebook closed.

Heather gave him an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry I can't give you anything concrete. I... The whole thing took me by surprise."

"Oh no, no. This—What you've told me is very helpful, actually." Eddie held out his hand and when she took it, gave hers a firm shake. "Thank you. And take care of yourself, okay?"

"Will do," she promised as they parted. "It was nice talking to you, Mister Brock."

"Eddie," he corrected her automatically, with a friendly smile that prompted Venom to snarl something unintelligible. He stepped backward off the porch, putting more space between them just in case. "You too, Heather. Thanks again."

With a wave, he turned away and moved down the sidewalk, as close to the victim's house as he could get before the police tape barred his way.

"What the hell was that?" he hissed, hiding it behind his collar by pretending to look around like he wasn't sure which way to go next.

**_We should have eaten her_**.

"Really? Her neighbor gets murdered and the next day she gets eaten? Why? You think she did it?"

**_Maybe._ **

They both knew that was bullshit. Eddie scowled, knowing that Venom would be able to feel it. "No you don't. I'm _working_ here, all right? Working so we have money for food and a place to live. If you can't handle that, this is gonna go back to a 'me thing' starting right now."

**_Helped_** , Venom replied, sounding somewhere between offended and petulant. **_With the dog. You weren't going to remember._**

"And I appreciate that," Eddie returned sincerely. "But threatening to eat the people providing the leads isn't helping. It's disruptive. For _us_ to work here, I need you to be more helpful and less disruptive."

He checked both ways down the street, saw that the coast was clear, and crossed over to the house standing opposite the victim's. As he climbed the steps to the front door, Venom murmured, still sounding out of sorts, **_Fine._**

The man that came to the door had been home last night, but he'd only realized something was amiss when the first responders arrived. He watched some of the drama from the window, though, and was able to confirm that the only body to be taken out of the house was that of a person. He knew about the existence of the neighbor's dog, but he hadn't seen it that night and had no idea what might have happened to it.

No one answered at the next two houses. The door to the third was opened by a friendly guy in his late twenties who, happy to talk to Eddie after recognizing him from his stint on TV, had nothing useful to add to the meager amount of information he'd already collected. He and his housemates hadn't been home for most of the evening, arriving only after the majority of the emergency personnel had left.

It was the same story with the rest neighbors he was able to talk to about the incident. Either they hadn't been home during the murder or it had taken sirens—and in one instance, hearing about it on the ten o'clock news—to clue them in that anything had happened. No one had seen anything strange in the neighborhood lately. No suspiciously behaving people. No cars parked where they shouldn't have been. No fights. And none of them had more than a passing familiarity with Autumn Alberts.

They saw her walking her dog or coming and going from the house every day, but they didn't know her or much about her life. They assumed she was employed because her comings and goings during the week were routine and that she was single because they never saw anyone else going in or out of her house. Ironically, they were more familiar with her dog, due to its striking appearance and the way it, in the words of one neighbor, "walked like one of those big show horses." But none of them knew what had become of it.

Eddie canvassed the entire street, knocked on every door and spoke with every person he could find, but after three hours, he hadn't managed to uncover anything new. Even Venom, who'd behaved himself for the remainder of the futile investigation, had nothing insightful to offer. He'd remained relatively quiet during the rest of the interviews, only piping up to remind Eddie to ask a question when a tangent dragged him too far off topic. It wasn't until they'd called it a day and were on their way back up to the top of the street where the bike was parked that he started getting chatty.

**_Hungry, Eddie. Is it time for fish now?_ **

_Fish?_ Momentary confusion seeped into understanding as he remembered the promise of sushi for lunch. Eddie glanced at his watch, not terribly surprised to see it was a little after 2:00 pm. Thanks to a long night and a... a _busy_ morning, they had gotten a pretty late start to the day. By the time they got to the restaurant, they'd probably be too late to take advantage of the cheaper lunchtime pricing, which would put a hurt on his ailing wallet, but it would also be less crowded.

"Yeah. Just gotta swing down the next street, see if we can get a look at the back of the victim's house."

A faint current of impatient irritation rippled through him, but Venom didn't start bitching or complaining about the delay. Eddie figured that was progress.

And it didn't end up taking very long.

Heather hadn't been exaggerating the layout of the lots. The backyards extended quite far, their boundaries marked by simple wooden panel fencing. What privacy it provided was partially negated by the slope of the land, making it easy to see up to the back porch and the area closest to the house. Between the fence and the sidewalk was a strip of overgrown grass that appeared not to be anyone's maintenance priority and a small, neatly trimmed parkway between the road and the sidewalk that was evidently the city's responsibility.

Eddie brought the bike to a stop at the curb behind the victim's house and sat there as it idled, surveying the property and the surrounding area. The back gate was slightly ajar, noticeable only because he was deliberately looking for signs of entry. All of the others appeared to be firmly closed. So had the dog escaped from the yard—he would've expected it to be hanging wide open if a large animal had barreled through it—or had the killer accessed the house this way? There was no way for him to tell.

He fished his phone out of his jacket and took a few shots of the gate and the view of the back of the house from the street. Maybe he would notice something when he looked at them later that was escaping his attention now. When he'd taken enough, Eddie put the phone away, took one last look around in the vain hope that he'd spot a lost German Shepherd loitering on the sidewalk, and seeing nothing, eased on the throttle and steered the bike out onto the street.

Maybe it was a stupid idea. It wouldn't be the first time that Eddie had one and quickly embarrassed himself and everyone associated with him by acting on it. But talking with the neighbors hadn't given him a number of leads to follow. It had just given him one: the dog, potentially the only actual witness to the murder and possibly still alive. If it was and if—big _if_ —he could find it, Venom could join with it for a few minutes and go through its memories, maybe pick up some clues or even better, find an image of the killer. Provided, of course, the dog hadn't been picked up by a grieving family member.

Charismatic as he could be when he really tried, Eddie sincerely doubted he could smooth-talk his way into the home of someone who had just lost a loved one to a violent, gruesome death for the purpose of interviewing the dog. _Honest, if you let me talk to Fido here for a few minutes, I might be able to find Miss Alberts' killer. See, I've got this alien creature in me that can jump on into the dog and inspect its memories._ Yeah, that would _definitely_ go over well.

But if the dog had just gotten out, if it was roaming around the neighborhood or had gotten picked up by someone and taken to one of the animal shelters, there was a chance he could find it. A tiny chance. The longest of longshots, probably. But what else was he doing with his time?

_I'll make some calls after we eat. Animal shelters. Maybe some of the veterinarian offices in the area. Animal control._ And with that thought came another. Didn't Anne know someone who worked there? An attorney friend's brother or husband or something? Eddie dimly recalled a long ago dinner with a group of Anne's friends and some guy trying to convince them that Mr. Belvedere needed a companion while they were at work.

"Hey," Eddie said, switching lanes to make a turn. "You mind if we stop by Anne's house real quick?"

This was a gamble. Putting another delay between Venom and food was asking for him to get pissy. But he also liked Anne and might not object if she was involved.

**_What about food?_ **

"We're still getting food. We can get more food since we missed lunch." And then when they got home, he was going to have to spend a few minutes readjusting his finances for the week. Either that or he would need to make peace with going hunting for criminals to eat and loot.

**_Fine. Visit Anne._ **

He had no idea if she was going to be home. She'd mentioned taking a job at the public defender's office, but they hadn't spoken much since that conversation and he didn’t know what sort of hours something like that required. Wasn't his business, either. But her house was kind of on the way and if she was there, it'd be one less call he'd have to make. Maybe a few less calls, if he could successfully rope a second person into searching for the dog. And if she wasn't home, no harm done.

A few minutes later, Eddie pulled up next to his former home, firmly refused to feel any sort of way about it, got off the bike, and went over to ring the bell. After a few seconds, he began to wonder if maybe stopping by unannounced had been a bad idea. Things had been pretty congenial between them after the mess with the Life Foundation, but that could have been due to the shared experience high of narrowly averting global disaster and managing not to die in the process. And also, unflatteringly, pity on Anne's part. Maybe now that time had passed and he wasn't dying anymore or publicly falling apart in spectacular fashion, she just wanted to be rid of him so she and Dan could get on with their lives.

Indecision and the sudden realization that he might be making a fool of himself _again_ made Eddie shuffle uncomfortably on the stoop. He took a step backward, stopped, glanced over his shoulder, looked doubtfully back at the still closed door, and decided that he'd lurked around long enough.

"Okay, nobody's home," he said, turning away. "Let's get some—"

"Eddie?"

He froze, snapped his mouth shut so fast he clipped the tip of his tongue, and spun around. "Oh, uh…" Smiling awkwardly, Eddie lifted a hand in greeting. "Hi, Dan."

Dan was standing in the open doorway, one hand still on the doorknob, as put together as Eddie wasn't. Hair neatly brushed, clean-shaven, his khaki pants and button-up shirt still bearing the crisp lines of having been recently ironed. Just looking at him made Eddie acutely aware of every wayward piece of stubble he hadn't shaved off in days, his disheveled hair, and the faded, starting to fray around the edges pieces of worn-out clothing he was wearing. _Why were you ever surprised that she dumped your ass?_ And to make matters worse, Dan was looking at him—the loser ex of questionable sanity who kept hanging around like a bad cold—with concern.

"What are you doing here?" It should have been an accusation. If their circumstances had been reversed, it would have been. But no, not Dan. With Dan, it was sincere concern for Eddie's well-being. "Everything okay?"

"Oh yeah, no, everything's fine." Eddie tried his damnedest not to look guilty as he waved the question off. "Is, uh, is Anne here?"

"No," Dan replied easily, without even a _hint_ of understandable irritation. "She's at work." 

"Oh," Eddie said dumbly, catching himself mid-fidget and forcing himself to straighten up and stop shifting his weight from foot to foot.

That was another problem with Dan. He was such a great guy—good looking, intelligent, nice, had a stable job that paid really well, honestly seemed to care about people, looked like he had his shit together, treated Eddie with respect he probably didn't deserve, didn't act jealous or territorial over Anne—that he made Eddie feel self-conscious and inadequate in absolutely every possible way. And Eddie's subconscious seemed determined to react to that by making him carry on like an incoherent, shady idiot whenever he was around.

Of course, Dan was too polite or perfect or unreal or whatever the fuck his deal was to call him on it. Despite Eddie just standing there like a moron, he smiled encouragingly and asked gently, "Is there something you need?"

Although he knew Dan wasn't trying to be patronizing, Eddie still felt irritation spike through him at the tone. Like he was a nutjob that needed handled with care.

**_We could still eat him_** , Venom offered helpfully, tone dark with hunger.

" _No_ ," Eddie said sharply, a little too loud and much more forcefully than the question warranted. Dan's eyebrows rose. "Er, uh, no, I—Sorry, I just..." _Goddamn it._ He shook his head and took a breath. "You don't know anyone over at Animal Control, do you?"

"Animal Control?" The look of polite interest Dan had been giving him sharpened into wary curiosity. "That thing isn't back, is it?"

Eddie stared at him blankly. "What thing?"

"The parasite—"

**_Not a parasite!_** Dan was still talking, Eddie could see his mouth moving, but Venom's furious snarl was drowning him out. **_I don't like him, Eddie. He wants to take you away from me!_**

Ordinarily, Eddie wasn't too shabby at reading lips. But Venom shouting in his head was a lot more distracting than someone yelling beside him. He had no idea how that statement ended or whether it had morphed into a question he was expected to answer.

"That's not—" He shook his head and held up a hand, not sure exactly what sort of gesture he meant to make or where he was trying to direct it. "No, it's a dog. I'm looking for a dog."

"You want a dog?" Surprise widened Dan's eyes. Eddie opened his mouth to correct him, but he kept going before he could get a word in. "Are you sure you—No, you know what? One of my coworkers found a nice boxer at the SPCA last month. Says he's been great for her. Really helped her adjust to the empty apartment after the divorce."

Here was another problem with Dan. No matter how simple a conversation with him should have been, somehow it always ended up getting away from Eddie. He could easily imagine how it would have gone with anybody else. _"Is Anne home? No? Okay, well can you tell her call me when you get a chance? Thanks, man."_ Two minutes tops, a handshake, and they could've both gotten back to their day.

But no. _No._ Eddie couldn't talk to the man who'd replaced him like a mature, _normal_ adult. Oh no. No, he had to stutter and fumble around and get sidetracked from whatever they were talking about by trying to keep his angry goo monster from outer space from eating the guy.

**_Not funny, Eddie._ **

"What?" he asked helplessly, rubbing his hand over his face.

Dan clapped him on the shoulder in what was clearly meant to sympathy. Between how pathetic that display of manly camaraderie made him feel and Venom hissing so violently that it made his teeth ache, Eddie wanted to sink into the sidewalk.

"Anne told me you're having a little, uh..." He paused delicately, obviously trying to figure out how to broach the subject without upsetting him. Eddie looked at him in morbid fascination, perversely amused by his struggle. _This is why no one likes you, Eddie. This. Right here._ "You know, getting used to things after the whole, um..." Dan floundered again before just giving up. "...illness."

It took every ounce of Eddie's willpower to suppress the laughter trying to roll up his throat. Dan already seemed to think he was a dozen cards short of a full deck. Laughing would probably sound like he was hysterical and that wasn't going to sell the fact that he was _fine_. He sounded only a little strangled when he finally offered a vague, "I don't..."

"And hey, if you need someone to talk to, that's okay. We don't have to tell Anne. You can stop by the hospital and I'll introduce you to—"

**_No! No hospital!_ **

Eddie shook his head vehemently. "No, that's, I mean, that's nice of you, but I don't need..." Lots of people probably thought he _did_ need a psychiatrist, but he sure as hell didn't need any more secrets. Desperately, he tossed the truth out there between them like a grenade. "Look, I'm working on a story."

Dan brightened at that. Eddie wanted so badly to believe that it was because once upon a time, before he'd seen him mid-crustacean massacre, he'd been a fan and thought of him as a cool dude. But realistically, he suspected that it was because Dan viewed him as a barely functional man-child and was trying to be supportive so he didn’t self-destruct and ruin Anne’s life again.

"Did you hear about the murder last night at Candlestick Point?" When Dan nodded, Eddie continued. "The victim had a dog. A German Shepherd. The neighbors think it might have gotten out of the yard during the murder. If it did, I want to find it."

"Why?"

_Shit_. Scrambling for a believable excuse, Eddie latched onto the first thing that came to mind. "The victim probably has a family somewhere, right?" He knew he should've felt bad about bullshitting Dan like this, but he just didn't. "It won't bring her back, but maybe having her dog will give the family some closure, you know?"

He could tell Dan bought it from the look on his face, though Eddie chose not to read too closely into what that expression meant. Except then he ruined that blissful ignorance by saying proudly, "That's really thoughtful of you, Eddie."

_Great. Just great._ "Yeah, well..." He gave him an awkward _what can you do_ shrug and redirected the conversation back to less embarrassing ground. "Can you ask Anne to call me later? She used to know a guy that worked for Animal Control. I forget his name. If he still works there, I'd like to get his number. See if anyone's brought in a lost dog. Maybe get a few recommendations on who else I can call."

With an easy-going smile, Dan nodded. "Sure. I'll ask her to call you as soon as she gets home."

Eddie's lips twitched in a reflexive smile of his own. "Thanks." _Okay, go. Quickly. Before you say something stupid and this gets even more awkward._ He took a step backward toward the curb, ducking his head in apologetic farewell. "Probably should've called but I was driving by and—Well, sorry for bothering you."

"Don't worry about it." Dan waved the apology away. "It was good to see you. Don't be a stranger, okay?"

It was big of him to make the offer, but Eddie wasn't dumb enough to take it to heart. Of course he didn't mean it. No normal human being wanted their significant other's ex-fiancé dropping by like they were old friends.

"Sure thing," Eddie said lightly, then turned and beat a hasty retreat to his bike. It wasn't the most graceful of exits, but it got him out of there and that was all that really mattered.

* * *

After he'd put a few blocks between them, Eddie exhaled hard and let the tension bleed out of him. "That could have gone better."

**_Should've let me eat him._ **

"Making me feel like an asshole isn't an eatable offense." If it had been, Venom could’ve single-blobbedly brought about the extinction of the human race.

**_Called me a parasite._ **

"Okay, but _I_ know you're not and since you're living in my body, my opinion carries more weight than his, right?"

**_Maybe._ **

Eddie had gotten fluent enough in sulky symbiote to interpret that as a _yes_. And he had enough experience with Venom in general to know when to take the win and change the subject. "You still up for sushi or do you want something else?"

**_How much can we get?_ **

"I’ve got fifty bucks." A distinct sense of confusion told him that number didn’t mean anything to Venom. "Enough to get one of those big dinners for two."

**_Yes. That. Fresh fish._** The clear current of pleased satisfaction that accompanied Venom’s voice erased any regret Eddie might have felt about wasting money so frivolously.

"Okay. Sushi it is."

Wanting to get the most for the money, he chose one of the cheapest sushi joints on the Wharf. It was a small place, clean and well lit but not particularly fancy. At this time of day, it wasn’t very busy either. A table in the corner would have provided enough privacy to talk openly, but when Venom showed interest in watching the chef make their dinner, Eddie obligingly took a seat at the bar. Much as he wanted a beer, he asked for a glass of water and ordered the largest two-person sushi dinner he could afford.

Venom’s attention immediately wandered to the selection of seafood behind the glass counter, leaving Eddie with nothing to do but watch the small TV hanging on the wall. It was set to an MNBN news program, of all things, but the reporter currently doing a segment on a traffic jam was someone he’d been passably friendly with so he wasn’t too bothered by it.

Traffic turned into weather and weather became a fluff piece about city-wide Halloween preparations. Eddie’s focus was beginning to wander, Venom’s impatience for food starting to make his stomach grumble, when the _Breaking News_ banner flashed across the screen, cutting off pumpkin carving safety tips. A chill shivered down his spine, totally at odds with the warmth of the restaurant.

Very slowly, Eddie set the glass he’d just picked up down on the bar and waited for it. A moment later, there it was.

A murder in Laurel Heights. Two victims: a seventy-five year old male and a sixty-three year old female. Found when their son and grandson stopped in for an unannounced visit. Both sitting neatly on the couch, dressed in their Sunday best. The tops of their heads had been cut off and carefully arranged on coasters on the coffee table. Their throats had been slit.

And candles burned behind their empty eye sockets.

Softly, more to himself than to Venom, Eddie murmured, "We have got to find that dog."


	3. Chapter 3

Thoroughly preoccupied with the calls he needed to make as soon as he got in the door and got settled, Eddie failed to notice any of the subtle hints of domestic discontent that might have prepared him for an impending argument. But he was focused on the possibility that there was a serial killer loose in San Francisco. An obviously deranged serial killer, if the gory theatrics were any indication.

The key turned in the lock. Eddie twisted the knob and elbowed the door open, trying to remember where he'd left the TV remote. He could put the news on while he made his calls, see if anything new had been uncovered from the second murder scene. Stepping inside, he absently pushed the door shut. And found himself slammed back against it so hard that the breath left his lungs.

"Whoa," he wheezed, automatically attempting to lift his hands in surrender and failing miserably. They didn't budge from where they were plastered against the door, inches from his legs. "Okay, what's the problem?"

A long tendril uncoiled from his side, rising until it was eye level with him and shaping itself into Venom's face. Those strange eyes narrowed. " **You liked that woman.** "

"What?" It took Eddie a few bewildered seconds to realize what woman his other meant, which, if he'd been paying attention, really should have clued Venom in to how great an impact she'd made on his life. "I don't even know her. I talked to her for like five minutes. For work. You know that. You were there."

" **Attracted to her** ," came the accusatory hiss.

"Well, yeah, she was pretty." Unable to make any kind of gesture to accompany that statement of the obvious, he rolled his eyes. "I have eyes, man. I can't help it when I notice stuff like that."

" **Didn't like it.** "

"What?"

Venom's low growl dimly reminded Eddie of the bobcats he'd seen snarling at each other on a nature documentary during one of his many post-Anne sleepless nights. Eerie. _Angry_. " **Looking at her. Smiling. Joking.** "

He sighed. "That's called being friendly."

" ** _Flirting_ ,**" Venom snarled back at him, dipping his head forward until his teeth were very, _very_ close to Eddie's face.

"Okay, yeah," he admitted quickly. "I was flirting a little. There's nothing wrong with—" The sudden pressure of a tendril curling possessively around his throat, just this side of too tight, cut him off. Venom growled again, clearly disliking that argument. Eddie scrabbled for a new one. "Strangling me isn't going to actually solve the problem!"

Slowly, like it was the chokehold keeping him immobile and incapable of running off to parts unknown with random miscellaneous women and not being held against the door, Venom's grip loosened until he could breathe properly again. " **You're _mine_.** "

_Boundaries. We're going to have to talk about boundaries. And sensible reactions to things. And not wringing my neck._ If he could've banged the back of his head on the door in aggravation, he would've done it. "I was _flirting_ , Venom. Not shopping for a new symbiote." He met his other's eyes with pointed determination, hoping he could will some sense into him. "Which, by the way, she wasn't. She was one hundred percent normal, ordinary human. Who—"

The tendril tightened again, though this time it stopped short of strangling him. " **Can't have you.** "

_Oh for fuck's sake._ "I wasn't offering myself to her!" Eddie shot back, exasperated.

" **Liar. You were flirting.** "

"That's not—" Belatedly, it dawned on him what the problem was. He took a deep breath, let it out, and asked with considerable more calm, "You don't really understand what flirting is, do you?"

For a creature without a nose, Venom could sniff with surprising authenticity. " **Human mating ritual.** "

Eddie tried _so fucking hard_ not to laugh, but it bubbled up in snorts and gruff coughs until he quit fighting it and let it happen. Venom reared back, baring his teeth in annoyance. _Damn it._ The muscles along his shoulders and arms twitched as he automatically tried to raise his hands in placating surrender.

"Sorry, I'm not laughing at you. It's just—" A chuckle snuck out mid-sentence. Eddie hastily cleared his throat and started over. "No, okay, look. Flirting, it's like, okay, it _can_ be a way to—" He wrinkled his nose at the choice of phrasing. "Not a mating ritual. But to like, gauge someone's interest in you. You know, like see if maybe another person would want to go have coffee with you, get to know you better."

How such a strange face could successfully convey judgmental disbelief was beyond him, but somehow, Venom managed it. Not wanting to get called a liar again, Eddie hurried on.

"But a lot of times it's just, I don't know. It's just having fun. Two people talking, complimenting each other. Nobody's making promises or looking to uh, mate. It's just a temporary connection." He waffled for a second on how personal he wanted to get with it. "Makes you feel a little better about yourselves."

" **You flirted with Anne.** "

"Yeah, and in that one _very specific relationship_ it was different. Because we were already together. So it was a way to express affection and appreciation." Honesty, and the fact that Venom could pick it from his brain, compelled him to add, "Maybe it sometimes it led sex, I won't deny that, but that wasn't always the goal."

" **What was the goal today?** "

"There was no goal. It was just nice."

" **Why?** "

He should have known that was coming. Of course Venom would ask why. He didn't get it. But that didn't mean Eddie wanted to parade out all of the unpleasant crap in his head just to explain human insecurities to an alien, either.

"Because..." Sighing, Eddie closed his eyes. "Man, I don't know. You're in my head. Figure it out."

Something smooth bumped against his forehead. " **Tell me.** "

"I really hate when you do this to me," Eddie muttered under his breath as he pried open his eyes. Venom was staring at him expectantly, the tendril upon which he'd formed subtly shifting back and forth. It reminded him a little of a cobra, though without the terrifying possibility of getting bitten. "It's just nice, okay? It makes people feel good to be wanted or to know other people find them attractive. Especially after the people who used to love them stop."

" **I want you.** "

"Yeah, no, I get that." In lieu of being able to pointedly tap the tendril around his throat, Eddie lifted his eyebrows significantly. Life would have been infinitely less complicated and frustrating if there was a guide for how to talk to an alien that chose what parts of humanity it wanted to understand and selectively ignored the rest so that it could take everything he said literally, and oftentimes wrong, whenever it suited its purpose. "You're being very clear about that right now. There is zero ambiguity here."

Venom's tongue licked across his teeth like he was contemplating eating Eddie's face. " **Won't share you.** "

"What about Anne?" Trying to reason with him when it was apparent that he wasn't willing to be reasonable was a last ditch effort, but desperate times occasionally called for desperate, futile measures. "You're fine sharing me with her."

A ripple of contemptuous disapproval passed over Venom's face, like he thought Eddie was being a dumbass on purpose. " **She is ours.** "

_What?_ "No," Eddie replied immediately, definitively. "No, no, she's definitely _hers_. Maybe Dan's too, if she wants to be. I don't know. But she's sure as hell not ours."

The disapproval got stronger. " **She was yours and she was mine. _Ours_.** "

"What are you—Wait." A memory he tried not to dwell on resurfaced: a forest at night, weary resignation of his impending death and an insidious sense of relief that finally everything would just be over, and his tormentors being ripped apart by something that was both familiar and not. "You mean, you mean when she carried you that one time?"

" **Yes.** "

Sensing a heaping load of bullshit being piled on top of him, Eddie's eyes narrowed. "You were inside a dog that night, too. Is that dog also yours?"

" **Maybe**."

Generally speaking, Eddie didn't mind being called on his shit. He screwed up often enough that he expected people to give him a ration of grief whenever they caught him doing it. But he drew the line very emphatically at hypocrisy and Venom was the biggest hypocrite he knew.

"So... So let me get this straight. _I'm_ yours. And everybody else you've ever been inside of is yours." Eddie scowled at him. "But I can't have anybody? Nobody can be _mine_?"

" **I'm yours** ," Venom replied defiantly, glowering right back.

"You're everybody else's too, apparently!"

Now he looked offended. " **I have not had that many hosts.** "

Everything in Eddie wanted to ask how many that actually was. The depths of his curiosity about Venom's life and his people was practically bottomless. But he couldn't let himself get sidetracked while he was in the middle of trying to make a damn point. _Add it to the list of shit you want to ask him about later._

"That's not the point." He heaved a heavy sigh. "I don't know if you're playing dumb or if you really don't get it."

" **Not dumb.** "

"It's a two-way street," he said, mostly managing to keep a grip on his patience. "You can't claim ownership of me and then go bond with everybody else. _We_ is you and me. Not you, me, Anne, some random dog, and anyone else you ever slithered into for five minutes."

Strangely, Venom looked _more_ offended by that. " **Haven't bonded with others.** " Sounded offended, too. " **Other hosts, yes, but only one bond.** "

"I don't really understand—Not the point." Eventually, when people weren't shooting at them or rampaging through the city murdering others, they really needed to sit down and have a long conversation about goo-blob and human culture so they could get past these weird linguistic dead zones. "Venom." Eddie tipped his chin toward his chest and stared until Venom met his eyes. "Do you understand me? What I'm saying?"

" **You're mine,** " Venom said firmly.

_You're such an asshole._ "That's not actually—"

" **Mine** ," he repeated loudly.

Eddie clenched his teeth until his jaw hurt. "And?"

Very slowly, like he was taking great pains to enunciate every word, Venom said, " **No more flirting.** "

He was going to murder him. Somehow. Flush him down the toilet or put him through the garbage disposal. _Something._ "Let me go."

Either because Eddie's voice was hard with poorly suppressed irritation or because he felt he'd made his point, Venom cooperated. The tendril around his neck sank beneath his skin, the rigidity went out of his muscles, and control returned as if it had never been absent. Without a word, Venom retracted into his body, disappearing from view entirely.

They had stupid arguments like this all the time. Usually it was over something incredibly dumb, like socks or Eddie's choice of terminology about any given subject or whether it was acceptable to eat pigeons, and neither of them was ever truly angry by the end of it. But Eddie was cruising past irritated straight to pissed off.

He made a few circuits around the apartment, looking for things to do to burn off some of the excess energy and hopefully calm down. But after booting up his laptop, turning on the TV and flicking through the channels to find a news program talking about the latest murder, and cleaning some crap off of the coffee table, he still felt like shouting. Evidently Venom must have realized that something was actually wrong this time, because he was suspiciously silent and didn't so much as twitch under Eddie's skin. The peace and quiet should have taken the edge off of the bad mood, but perversely, it just annoyed him further. And the worst part was, he didn't really know _why_ he was so ticked off at his other in the first place.

It wasn't the presumptuous ban on flirting or the brief hijacking of his body. The former was too ludicrous to take seriously and the latter didn't bother him nearly as much as he thought that it probably should have. It was usually inconvenient when it happened and he knew that not firmly putting an end to it was just enabling Venom to continue throwing tantrums over nonsense, but it never _hurt_ him and control always came back whenever he genuinely got fed up. Those were nuisances, too trivial to do more than irk him in the moment. This was something else.

And maybe the easiest explanation was also the correct one. Maybe it was nothing more than the hypocrisy of Venom's expectations. Eddie had never enjoyed being told what he could and couldn't do, especially when the rules were different and more lenient where everybody else was concerned. But that was almost too simple. Too convenient. Too reasonable for the jagged edge of his anger.

The darker, less complimentary possibility was one he didn't want to credit. That it was some sort of immature jealousy over Venom having reached a level of intimacy with Anne that he never would. And he didn't want to be that guy. He _wasn't_ that guy. Sure, seeing her with Dan that first night had left him feeling sad and pathetic. It had steered his feet to the bridge with nebulous intentions and an exhausted longing to just be _done_. But he'd gotten better. _Life_ had gotten better. Besides, if he wasn't jealous of Dan, the human embodiment of Anne trading up to a level of perfection that Eddie could never _ever_ hope to achieve, he sure as hell wasn't going to be jealous of an alien who didn't even really care about her.

It was stupid. He was stupid. He was being stupid. And he was going to stop right the fuck now.

Eddie inhaled until his lungs started to burn, then exhaled slowly and stopped in the span of floor between the kitchen and the makeshift living room. Putting his hands on his hips, he surveyed the empty space in front of him.

"Listen to me," he began matter-of-factly, knowing without needing confirmation that Venom was doing just that. "I'm not going anywhere. Nobody is a threat to you. Not where I'm concerned. But sometimes I'm gonna have to flirt. Okay? It's part of the job. People talk to you if you're nice to them and sometimes they tell you things they normally wouldn't. So I might have to be super nice and act more interested than I am, but that doesn't mean that I _am_ interested or that I have any intention of dumping you at the nearest science lab."

**_So you're going to lie?_ **

There was a slight edge to the question, but Eddie's emotional equilibrium was too disrupted to figure out if it was condemnation or curiosity. "Never pretended to be perfect, pal," he replied, a tad stiffly.

**_To them_ ** **.**

He recognized an order when he heard one, but instead of provoking his anger, it only made him ask, exasperated, "Why would I lie to you? You know when I'm lying."

**_You lie to yourself._ **

He couldn't pretend to deny that. "I'm human." Eddie rolled his shoulders in a casual shrug. "That's what humans do."

**_Why?_ **

_No fucking clue._ If he had even a tiny inkling of why people did the stupid-ass things they did, he could write a book about it and probably make a ton of money. The best he could do was offer a cop-out, albeit an honest one. "Because we're a very flawed species."

**_Yes_**. That low voice managed to sound disgusted and superior at the same time. **_You are._**

Venom's terrible opinion of humanity wasn't anything new. Half the time, Eddie found it amusing. But this time, it grated on his already inexplicably raw nerves. "Plenty of other bodies out there," he said peevishly, waving a hand at the window and the world beyond it. "Go find another one if you're too good for me."

Uneasy silence settled over them, not quite tense yet thick with the promise that it might become that way if one of them didn't do something about it in a hurry. Eddie cast around for something to say that would mollify them both without forcing him to do any soul-searching to figure out what his problem was, but he drew a blank. After a moment, Venom came to the rescue.

**_You are still angry with me._ **

The statement was tinged with just enough uncertainty that it made Eddie feel guilty. "I'm not—" No, that was probably going to be a lie. He wandered over to the couch and sat down with a sigh. "I don't know what I am."

**_Confused._ **

That was obvious. He was mostly successful in not getting defensive about it. "Yeah, well, I'm still getting the hang of this." The accompanying circular gesture he made in front of himself wasn't necessary to illustrate what he meant by _this_ , but he did it anyway.

**_So am I._ **

"What are you talking about? You've been inside other humans before."

**_Told you. Many hosts._ ** **One _bond._**

It seemed like the truce was holding. Eddie offered a crooked smile to the air and said lightly, "You saying I'm special?"

**_Idiot._ **

“Right." Rolling his eyes, Eddie scrubbed his hands over his face. "Good talk."

Whatever else was going on, at least the uneasiness between them had disappeared. Nothing had actually been _resolved_. He knew Venom would throw another possessive tantrum the next time he smiled at someone a little too long or anybody seemed even halfway interested in him beyond what necessary conversation required. And whatever childish jealousy made him so irritable was still lurking somewhere inside of him like a live explosive, waiting to blow up in his—in _their_ —face.

_Might not be much fun, but you’re going to have to figure it out soon_ , he told himself sternly. _You’ve got a good thing going here. Rebuilding some kind of a relationship with Anne. This thing with Venom. If you start pulling your usual shit, you’re going to fuck it up._ Self-reflection wasn't his forte, but even Eddie knew that there was a limit to how many times he could drag himself up out the holes he dug and that eventually, he was going to run up against something he couldn't come back from.

_Murderer first. Stupid personal issues later._ Easier said than done, of course, but he _had_ managed to stop a rich lunatic and an alien from setting off an invasion. That had to be harder than trying to act like a goddamn adult.

**_Eddie._ **

"Hm?"

The phone started ringing. Half expecting Venom to ignore it and keep talking, he was surprised when nothing further was forthcoming. All he got from him was the faintest sense of expectation, almost like he was politely waiting for him to take the call.  

"One second," Eddie murmured, fishing the phone out of his pocket. "I'll—Oh. It's Anne." Swiping the lock screen out of the way, he tapped his thumb against the answer button and hoped like hell Venom would take the warning to heart and not interrupt. "Yeah?"

"Dan told me you stopped by," Anne said by way of a greeting. Her tone sounded pleasant enough, but he knew that that didn't really mean anything.

"Is that—Yeah. Came to see you," he replied, just barely escaping making it sound like a question.

Maybe the clarification would assuage any potential fears that he'd dropped by to cause trouble. If indeed she had any of those. Anne knew him better than to honestly believe he'd sabotage her relationship with Dan, but given his abysmal track record, he wouldn't blame her if the thought had crossed her mind.

"He said you wanted a dog."

There was a flat edge to that statement that he couldn't confidently translate. "Not any dog. The dog from last night's murder." Which, he realized after the words left his mouth, probably wasn't any better.

"Yeah," she said dryly. "He said." In the pause that followed, Eddie automatically braced for the worst. "Eddie, are you all right?"

"What?" he returned blankly, caught off-guard by her concern.

"He said you were a little distracted."

Wincing, Eddie suddenly had a vision of where this was going. Poor, emotionally unstable Eddie, probably drinking again, lonely and fucked up after being half-possessed by an alien, unable to properly look after himself and now trying to rope some other unfortunate living creature into the flaming wreckage of the disaster he called his life. And Anne, forever unable to truly escape the gravitational pull of his human-shaped black hole, feeling a misguided sense of responsibility to sort him out before he adopted a dog and accidentally neglected it to death.

"Yeah, I was distracted. I was working. Trying to follow up on some leads about the murder." _I'm not having a breakdown_ , he emphatically didn't say, hoping that the reasonableness of the words and the firm confidence in his voice would effectively communicate the message. _I'm fine._

She wasn't buying it. "By looking for a dog?"

Anne's sharp mind was one of the things that he had loved—did love—still loved in a harmlessly platonic— _Eddie really appreciated_ how smart and clever Anne was, but sometimes, he wished she could be just a _little_ dumber about things when he was involved.

"It's the victim's dog," he reminded her sensibly. "I want to find it to—"

Like they were having this conversation face to face, he could see her nodding along in that barely humoring way she did whenever she knew he was full of shit. "Reunite it with the family, yeah. Dan told me what you said."

Eddie nodded himself, decisively, and soldiered on in an effort to derail any further inquiries into his mental and emotional well-being. "Okay, so do you still know that guy who—"

She didn't let him finish. "Why are you really looking for that dog, Eddie?"

He froze, literally froze in the middle of starting to get to his feet, like she'd just walked in on him mid-transformation into Venom after these past few weeks of peddling the lie that the symbiote had perished in the explosion. _Shit. Shit shit shit._

**_She knows_ **

"I—What?" He meant it to sound confused. He was afraid it was a little too weak to be convincing. "I told you. I told Dan."

**_She knows I'm still here_** **.** Tendrils were rising to the surface of his forearm, blotting out the tattoos.

"Eddie," Anne said sharply.

He flinched, breaking the guilty paralysis, and sank limply back down onto the cushion. "What?"

"What are you doing?"

Was that a trick question? "I'm sitting on the couch in my apartment?" he hazarded uncertainly.

The deep breath she took was audible through the phone. "I _meant_ , what are you up to?"

Vehemently shaking his head probably didn't translate into a tone of believable sincerity, but he did it automatically. "I'm not up to anything, Anne. I just—"

"Don't bullshit me."

"I'm not! You're not letting me finish," he protested, waving his free hand around and jostling Venom, in the middle of manifesting his face, into losing cohesion. "If you'd let me finish, I could answer your question. But you keep talking over me." Now he was whining and he knew it. He just had too much momentum, he couldn’t stop. "I can't answer you if you—"

Anne cut him off again, brusquely. “Okay. Finish.”

**_Now what? She called your bluff_**.

Finding the commentary from the peanut gallery entirely unhelpful, Eddie turned his head away and covered the phone’s receiver with his free hand. “I know that,” he hissed under his breath. “ _Shut up._ ”

“Eddie.”

_Fuck._ Had she heard him? “Hm?” he inquired innocently as he put the phone back to his head.

“I’m waiting.”

The stupidest part about this whole conversation was that he didn't owe Anne any explanations. They weren't together anymore. They weren't ever going to be together again. Their responsibility to share bits of their lives with each other was gone. Anne had reminded him of that very clearly that first time he'd asked about Dan. He didn't _have_ to tell her anything. But they'd been together a long time, much longer than they'd been apart, and old, comfortably familiar habits were hard to break.

Hanging onto them wasn't going to bring back the past, though. It was already gone. _Anne_ was already gone. Gone and moved on to the next, undoubtedly better, chapter of her life. If Eddie was serious about letting go—and he really, really was—he actually needed to _let go_. Of Anne, of the habits he'd developed because of her, of the inside jokes and nostalgia and all the little things that still reminded him of her and what they'd had.

" _Three hours_ I spent down there this morning." He allowed some of the frustration he'd felt earlier that day to leak into his voice. "Talked to as many neighbors as I could find and no one saw anything. _Nothing._ The only thing _any_ body could talk about was that dog. Now, the back gate was ajar and the neighbor said she heard the dog out in the yard before the murder. So maybe it got out. Maybe it didn't. But if it actually survived, it deserves better than to wander around lost in the middle of October and starve. Somebody ought to find it."

Anne knew that he wasn't completely heartless. When he'd worked for MNBN, he'd taken the stories he had because he'd wanted to help people, to make a difference the only way he knew how to do it. He'd never involved himself in reuniting lost pets with their families, but since the woman was dead and there were no leads that might help in identifying her killer, there wasn't much else he could do for her. Odd as it sounded, it wasn't completely outside the realm of possibility that he might've taken on this project simply because he wanted to help and was unable to do anything else.

"Plus, Anne, have you seen the news?" Admittedly, this was a cheap redirection, but Eddie wasn't above playing dirty when he was backed into a corner. "Two more people have died. An elderly couple in Laurel Heights. Happened after the first murder, so obviously they haven't caught whoever's doing it. Finding the dog might be the only closure the family's getting for a long time."

It was just impassioned enough that Eddie almost believed it himself. And it must have convinced Venom, because he sounded disappointed as he asked, **_Does this mean I can't eat the dog after we find it?_**

Eddie opened his mouth immediately, caught himself before he could speak, and swallowing the vehement denial down, emphatically shook his head. _No!_

**_You are no fun._ **

Anne's sigh brought Eddie's attention back to the conversation. "All right." He couldn't tell if he’d legitimately sold her on the ridiculous story or if he'd just succeeded in wearing her down. "I'll text you Richard's number."

A win was a win however he got it. "Thank you."

She hummed noncommittally. "What are you doing tomorrow night, Eddie?"

"Uh..." That sounded like a trick question, but to the best of his recollection, he wasn't doing anything, so it couldn't be. "Nothing. Why?"

"Come over for dinner."

It wasn't a trick. It was a fucking trap. "Do what?"

"Come over for dinner," she repeated slowly, like she was talking to a distracted child.

"Ah, but that's—That's weird. Isn't it? No, I couldn't do that. Dan probably wouldn't like that."

Not even taking into account the complications inherent in Venom’s presence, Eddie thought it was a pretty bad idea on a personal level. Normal couples didn't invite the ex-fiancé over for dinner. It would be awkward for Dan, embarrassing for Anne, and uncomfortable for Eddie. Yeah, he’d made a lot of progress on the whole getting on with his life thing and he wasn't so sad or lonely that he was falling apart anymore, but that didn't mean that he wanted to push his luck. Having dinner in the home that used to be his and watching another man live the life he'd lost seemed like asking for all the old wounds to be torn open, regardless of how he felt about Anne these days.

"It's was Dan's idea. He wants to grill steaks."

**_Steaks?_ **

" _Dan's_ idea? Dan, your doctor boyfriend _Dan,_ wants me, your ex, Eddie Brock, to come to dinner? With the two of you?" This pretty much solved the mystery. Dan wasn't human. Eddie didn't know what he was, but he sure as hell was not human. Couldn't be. Maybe he was an alien. Venom was an alien, and if he found his way to Earth, who was to say that there weren't more already there? Maybe Dan was part of an invasion force too. "And _you're_ okay with that?"

**_He is human. I would know if he was not_ ** **.**

"Of course I'm okay with it," Anne returned evenly.

Of course, she was. Because Anne had gotten over it months ago. Anne had moved on. Anne was in love with Mr. Perfect Alien Man. Eddie was the only who still had some residual shit to get over. Apparently.

"I—I don't know, Anne. I'm not—"

"C'mon, Eddie. It'll be nice."

_Will it?_ The food would be, he had no doubt about that. Thick cuts of steak grilled to perfection, because Dan would be some kind of amateur chef too. Enough steak-appropriate side dishes to constitute a proper dinner, which he hadn't had in a _long_ time, and wine that probably cost more than the steaks. But there would also be awkward conversations and even more awkward conversations when Venom inevitably did something that made Eddie act suspicious and weird.

**_Are you ashamed of me?_ **

That was manipulation of the highest order. Or it would have been if Venom had been able to affect a tone of anything remotely like genuine hurt. Instead, it came off sounding like mock outrage and Eddie wasn’t that gullible. He knew damn well that Venom had chosen that phrase because he’d seen it work like a charm for characters in trite television dramas.

Covering the phone with his hand again, he leaned away from it and hissed quietly, "You don't even like Dan!"

**_I like food. I want steaks._ **

"It's dead! They aren't going to bring a live cow into the apartment. And you can't eat Dan afterward."

**_Still want to go._ **

Sensing an ignoble defeat—if he refused, Venom would pester him for steaks and he had neither the money to buy them nor the grill to cook them on—looming on the horizon, Eddie gave up. "Fine," he said into the phone, talking to both of them. "Dinner tomorrow. What time?"

"Six-thirty?"

"Yeah. That works."

"Great. I'll send that text now. Have a good night, Eddie."

"You too," Eddie returned, lowering the phone to his lap and tapping the disconnect button. He stared at it for a few seconds, then tossed it onto the other end of the couch and slumped backward with a groan, covering his eyes with his palms. "This is going to be a disaster."

**_Eat two steaks, Eddie._ **

"Not how dinner parties work, buddy," he mumbled into his hands.

**_More than two?_ **

As his phone pinged with the receipt of a text, Eddie pulled one of the pillows over his face and tried, unsuccessfully, to smother himself with it.

* * *

Richard was only too happy to reach out to his friends and contacts in the world of animal welfare. Most of them were veterinarians and shelter workers, but one happened to be a close friend who worked for the SFPD and knew the detectives in charge of investigating the homicide. Although asking for details that might jeopardize the case was absolutely out of the question, he was confident that he could at least get a yes or a no out of the woman about whether or not they knew the dog's whereabouts. He promised to make the calls that afternoon and get back to Eddie with the results as soon as possible.

With his own list considerably reduced by Richard's willingness to help him, Eddie spent a good hour and a half calling likely prospects. Convincing strangers that he was involving himself out of the goodness of his heart was infinitely easier than it had been with Anne. Unfortunately, none of them had seen the dog or heard about a stray German Shepherd being found anywhere within the city, but he left his number with each of them and they all promised to get in touch if they had information.

On the news, coverage of the new murder turned into rehashing the previous one as the spokesman for the police department gave a statement to reporters and revealed that investigators were looking for connections between the two crimes outside of the obvious to rule out a copy-cat killing. The media was willing to take greater risks and had already dubbed whoever was responsible the Jack O'Lantern killer. Thus far, it seemed like the latest victims weren't personally associated with the first one. The man who'd found them had released a statement attesting that as far as he knew, neither he nor his family knew the woman.

Eddie spent some time after dinner—a quart of leftover lo mein from two days ago, a bag of frozen French fries, and a box of chocolate-covered miniature donuts—googling the names of the three victims and doing a little internet investigation of his own, but he wasn't able to find a thread that connected them. The elderly couple didn't have any social media accounts that he could find and the woman appeared to have had only a single Twitter account full of nothing but retweets of cat photos. Retirees at the time of their deaths, the man had been a mathematics professor at SFSU and his wife had been a doctor employed by UCSF. The young woman had been middle management at an IT firm. The career paths were so dissimilar that if there had been a link between them, Eddie couldn't see it. And other than the articles about their deaths, he couldn't find any of their names in the news.

The deeper he dug, the more it looked like the only thing they had in common was that they both called the city home. He couldn't rule out the possibility that the killer had encountered the victims at a public location and chosen them there, though that opened up so many possibilities—parks, public transportation, restaurants, grocery stores, tourist attractions—that it did nothing to narrow down the pool of people who might become victims in the future.

Eventually, the frustration of finding nothing but more questions and the bleed of his other's restlessness prompted Eddie to close the laptop for the night and propose that they take a walk. A normal human walk with the possibility of an evening snack if they happened to be in the right place at the right time. Venom agreed, content to ride along and people-watch through Eddie's eyes.

Without a destination in mind, they walked north until they hit the bay, then turned west and meandered along Bay Street until they passed Fort Mason. It was only after they turned left down Fillmore that they hit a snag. Venom wanted to go further west to Golden Gate Park, where he hoped that criminally-minded individuals would be lurking in the darkness, ready to prey on hapless fools who didn’t know better than to wander around secluded areas at nighttime. Not wanting to turn a walk into a full-blown excursion, Eddie suggested cutting through Lafayette Park instead. The prospects weren’t even remotely the same, and since he knew that, he was pretty sure that Venom did too, but surprisingly, he accepted the offer with only minimal grumbling.

Unfortunately for the bottomless pit that served as the symbiote’s stomach, they didn’t find anyone who deserved to be eaten on their travels by the time they neared the apartment. Wanting to head off the bitching he suspected was coming, Eddie stopped in at a convenience store and shelled out the three bucks for another box of donuts. It wasn’t a hundred and some odd pounds of flesh and blood, but it was the best he could do.

“Just save some for tomorrow,” Eddie said a few minutes later, standing in the kitchen as Venom slowly slid over his skin and enveloped him. _Money doesn’t grow on trees._

“ **Just a handful** ,” Venom promised, as they tugged the top off the box, barely avoiding destroying it.

A handful meant something different when it wasn’t the size of a normal human hand, but Venom jammed the lid back on after pouring about two dozen of the little donuts down their throat. He relinquished the body immediately, seeping underneath Eddie’s skin without a word and leaving a faint, too sweet taste of chocolate donut on his tongue.

Absently licking his lips, Eddie glanced at the clock. It was after midnight. Definitely time for bed, especially since he wanted to go over to Laurel Heights in the morning and nose around. He took a step toward the bed, already yawning in anticipation of burrowing under the sheets and falling asleep, then something in him—something in _him_ , not Venom’s casually obnoxious puppeteering—made him stop and abruptly change direction in favor of the bathroom. It wasn’t until he was standing in the lukewarm spray of the shower, blinking water out of his eyes and trying to figure out if the twisty sensation in his gut was Venom or the donuts, that it occurred to him what was going on.

He was stalling.

And it wasn’t the donuts upsetting his stomach or Venom rearranging his insides for the hell of it that was making him feel unsettled. It was a nervous sort of anticipation that he hadn’t felt in _years_. So many, in fact, that it had taken him an embarrassingly long time to recognize it.

He was fucking _nervous_. About going to bed. Because the last time he’d been over there, Venom had—

Eddie yanked his mind away from that memory before it could dig in and get started. If he thought about it, his body was going to betray him and react. And if that happened, Venom was going to notice. And if Venom noticed, he would probably want to get involved again. And that would be bad. Very bad. Because…

_Because._

Not for the first time, he wished that there was a way to think without his other overhearing everything. Venom somehow managed to do it. Eddie often got feelings and impressions from him, but unless he deliberately spoke to him or shared his thoughts, there was no way to know what he was thinking. Yet Eddie couldn’t have a semi-conscious idle thought without Venom overhearing and commenting on it. He distinctly recalled asking about it twice, once out of curiosity and once due to frustration, and both times Venom had taken offense because he thought Eddie wanted to keep secrets from him.

_Probably listening now, aren’t you?_ Closing his eyes, Eddie turned his face up directly into the path of the water and scrubbed his fingers vigorously over his scalp. _And you’re not answering me because you’re pissed off. But I don’t want to keep you in the dark. I just want to figure some shit out without making an idiot of myself._

Venom gave no indication that he heard him and Eddie wasn't comfortable saying the words out loud. It didn't make any sense; the sentiment was no less real for not being vocalized and deep down he _knew_ that, but Eddie could bullshit himself even better than he could bullshit other people. And despite all evidence to the contrary, despite Venom pointedly rubbing his face in the truth of it whenever he got fed up with him, he continued to stubbornly believe that saying shit out loud made it a hell of a lot more real than simply thinking it. At least when it came to emotional vulnerability, anyway.

Hiding in the shower forever wasn't a viable option, though. His skin was getting a little pruny around the fingertips and the water was already beginning to lose its thin veneer of warmth. Pretty soon Venom would get impatient with him and say something sarcastic, ruining the illusion that he was clueless about Eddie's complicated mess of conflicted emotions and making the whole predicament that much worse. In an effort to avoid having to awkwardly explain himself or make a bunch of lame-ass denials, he finally rinsed off, shut the water off, and reluctantly left the false security of the tub.

Suspiciously peaceful silence hung over him as he toweled off, brushed his teeth, and nonchalantly went in search of clean clothes. It continued as he got dressed, shut off all the lights, climbed into bed, and hauled the sheets up to his chin. Which was all perfectly normal and mundane: October nights could get pretty cool in San Francisco and the building's heating system was mediocre at best. Closing his eyes, he took a few slow, deep breaths in a none-too-subtle nudge for his body to get the message and go to sleep.

**_What's the plan?_ **

Eddie's eyes snapped open. "What?"

**_For tomorrow._ **

_Oh. Right. Okay._ "Go to the site of the second murder and talk to the neighbors, same as we did today."

**_And steaks for dinner._ **

"Yeah." And he thought _he_ had a one-track mind sometimes. A small smile stole across his mouth. "And steaks for dinner. Preferably without making me look like a lunatic in front of Anne and Dan."

**_Because you want to win her back_** , Venom murmured tonelessly.

"Because we're still keeping you a secret," Eddie corrected him, wanting there to be no misunderstandings on that score so that he didn't do anything outrageously obvious tomorrow night and give the whole game away. And maybe that should've been the end of it, but Eddie was still awake enough to recognize the difference between Venom's statement now and the one from a few weeks ago. He couldn't resist digging a little deeper. "I thought you wanted to win her back too."

**_I have changed my mind. She is happy with Dan._ **

"But you don't like Dan."

**_She does._ **

That was a surprisingly mature response from something that often behaved like a brat. Eddie was impressed. "That's right. She does. She loves him and she's very happy with him. Which is a big part of why I don't want to win her back anymore either."

As he said it, he felt the truth of it deep in his bones. He loved her. He would probably always love her. But it wasn't the same anymore and not just because he was trying to convince himself that he was over her. He really wasn't _in love_ with her anymore.

**_Why not?_** There was some kind of emotion driving the question, strong enough to feel yet too faint to properly identify. Not surprise, exactly. Not quite curiosity, either.

Although he was a little too tired for this conversation, Eddie was also too tired to be terribly self-conscious about having it. "Feelings change sometimes. Our relationship ended and yeah, I was sad about it. I wanted to fix things. But time passed. She met Dan. I met you. We both moved on."

Venom said nothing after that and as the silence lengthened, Eddie yawned and closed his eyes again. He was drifting precariously close to sleep when an openly curious question yanked him back to wakefulness. **_What's the other part?_**

_Huh?_ It took him a few seconds to figure out what Venom meant. "Oh. Well, I've got you, don't I? That's enough for me."

Figuring that hashing out that he wasn't going to try to ditch Venom for Anne was the end of it, Eddie closed his eyes for a third time and tried to sink back down into sleep.

**_Eddie._ **

Groaning in frustration, he turned over onto his side and pressed his face into the pillow. "What?" 

**_Want to feel good again._ **

"Good," he mumbled back, tugging the end of the pillow up around his ear like that would block out Venom's voice. "Sleep's good. Feels great. Let's do that."

No immediate response was forthcoming, suggesting that maybe he'd gotten the hint. Eddie let his hand fall onto the mattress and started to relax. Right up until the moment that he felt something brush against his stomach and realized it was his hand, moving under the symbiote's direction.

**_Want to make_ ** **you _feel good._**

It wasn't until he felt his fingers slide over his dick that he clued in to what was going on and by then he was already getting hard. Whether that was Venom's influence or his stupid sex-starved body reacting to the combination of physical contact and the oddly arousing cocktail of lust and uncertainty churning to life in his gut, he couldn't tell and didn't want to dwell on.

"Oh." Dumbly, he laid there a few more seconds, caught up in the sensation of his fingers running up and down his shaft. It took the too-sharp pleasure-pain jolt of his fingernail scratching over the tip of his cock to snap him out of it. Rolling onto his back, he grabbed his wrist with his other hand and conveniently ignored how weird that was. "Not tonight. It's late and I'm..."

Confused. Conflicted. Really turned on by the idea of having weird alien sex with Venom and unable to admit it to either of them. Hopelessly inept at navigating normal human relationships and completely adrift at the prospect of trying it with something infinitely more complex.

As he struggled to figure out how to put all of it into words without actually examining or saying any of it, Venom took advantage of the silence and pointed out in a tone that suggested that he thought he was being helpful, **_Your penis is erect_**.

The clinical absurdity of it made Eddie flinch. Surprise at that reaction filtered through their connection as Venom went still. Though he did not—unfortunately? thankfully?—relinquish control of the hand.

**_What?_ **

How in the fuck was he supposed to explain the concept of dirty talk and what was and was not appropriate to the success of said form of communication to an alien that he was pretty sure had never actually experienced anything remotely sexual until yesterday morning? And why was he being forced to do it at the ass-end of the night when he should've been sleeping?

"You have the worst timing for this stuff, you know that?" He drummed his fingertips against his own wrist. _Hell._ "It's just—That was a bad way to say it."

Confusion replaced surprise. **_It's true._**

"I know." Seriously, they could've talked about this earlier. "But certain words are better for certain situations and you have to pick the right ones."

**_How?_ **

Eddie frowned. "Trial and error, mostly. Lots of pissing people off and embarrassing yourself."

**_What's wrong with the words I used?_ **

"When you're fooling—" He paused, reconsidering his phrasing. Blundering through it wasn't going to work with something that often took him more literally than he intended. But to talk about this, he was going to have to start defining what all of _this_ was and that required an uncomfortable amount of being honest with himself. "When you're doing this, what we're—"

Venom chose that moment to poke a few tendrils up from the vicinity of his ribcage and manifest a face. Presumably because they were having a Serious Conversation and he'd rooted around in Eddie's memories long enough to uncover numerous arguments, lectures, and intense discussions over the course of his life wherein it had been important to _look at me when I’m talking to you._ Because he was looking at him even though it wasn’t necessary. The lights filtering in through the windows reflected in those big white eyes, making them look more intently focused than they probably were.

Eddie inhaled bracingly through his nose and pushed through the discomfort. "Sex. It's a kind of sex, right? And when you're trying to have sex, you want the right mood. You want things to be stimulating. And talking like a textbook—" A better example struck him. "— or a doctor isn't."

_Doctor_ , Eddie knew, was indelibly associated with _Dan_ and _hospital_ and _MRI_. Things Venom didn't like. Things Venom wouldn't want to think about in the midst of doing something enjoyable. And it worked. He could see, _feel_ , the understanding overtake the symbiote's confusion.

_Thank fuck_. He exhaled in relief and slowly eased up on the grip he had on his wrist. _Now we can stop talking about this._ Talking had taken the edge off of his arousal and with it no longer claiming center stage, his cock was softening and his mind was drifting back toward the hazy precipice of sleep.

A blast of cold air wrenched him back to wakefulness. “What the—”

The sheets were askew, partly bunched down by his knees and partly spilling over the side of the mattress. Eddie’s hand was pulling the front of his pajama pants away from his stomach, holding the waistband a few inches off his skin as that one thick tendril stretched down his abdomen and disappeared underneath it. He cottoned on just as Venom’s warm, wet tongue slowly lid up along the length of his cock.

Eddie shuddered with raw, shameless pleasure as his mind went blank, empty of objections and uncertainty. Venom gave a low, silky growl. “ **Aren’t you stimulated, Eddie?** ”

Arousal came flooding back so quickly that he groaned. “No, I am. Obviously. But it’s—You want it to sound good, you know? You want to get aroused by it.”

“ **You are now. I can taste it.** ”

That… should have been more disturbing than it was. But Eddie’s mouth went dry in the strangest way and his fingers itched to touch something that simply wasn’t there. “Do you like it?” he asked roughly, forgetting for an instant to be self-conscious about it. “The way it tastes?”

“ **Yes,** ” Venom rumbled in unconcealed pleasure, voice so low Eddie could almost feel it in his bones.

“Okay, so, if you talk a certain way while you’re doing stuff like this, it makes you _more_ aroused.”

A wordless hum echoed through the air between them and vibrated through Eddie’s body. Comprehension and acceptance. Pleasure and greedy desire. “ **Teach me.** ”

Somewhere between Venom making an observation about his erection and dragging his tongue over it, Eddie had subconsciously made peace with enacting an encore performance of the morning’s activities. He was hard again, he was turned on despite himself, and he wanted more of _something._ His hand, Venom’s tongue, it didn’t matter what it was, he just wanted to be touched. And Venom wasn’t touching him _at all_.

“What?”

“ **Narrate this in a way you find arousing.** ”

_One step forward. Two steps back_ , Eddie thought, groaning in exasperation instead of lust this time. “You aren’t supposed to _narrate_ it. Just—” He’d been doing fine a minute ago. “Describe what you want to do, what you’re thinking or feeling, what you want your partner to do to you.”

“ **What do you want, Eddie?** ”

_To stop talking about it and just fucking_ do _it._ “I…”

Acknowledging that they were poised to… jerk off? Have sex? Was it technically masturbation because they shared the same body or did having two distinctly separate minds and personalities make it sex? That was a philosophical quandary that was too easy to get trapped inside. Whatever it was, it was easier to exchange sexually charged banter about it in the heat of the moment than it was to have to think about it first. Eddie floundered. And because he floundered too long for his impatient other, Venom gave him another long, lingering lick.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Eddie breathed, instinctively arching his hips, trying to get closer, trying to get _more_.

“ **You like that.** ” He sounded so fucking smug.

The smart thing to do would’ve been to put the kibosh on that real quick, prevent it from getting out of hand, but he just couldn’t be bothered. He could barely manage to coherently murmur his breathless, unnecessary agreement. “Yeah.”

“ **What else do you like?** ”

If he hadn’t been aware that Venom was genuinely attempting to learn the right way to talk to him while they were doing this, Eddie would’ve suspected that he was just teasing with that question. Even knowing the truth of it, he wasn’t entirely convinced that that wasn’t part of it and he _so_ wasn’t in the mood for it.

“Just touch me already, damn it.” One of his hands remained in the symbiote’s control, but the other was still his. No longer willing to wait for Venom to get with the program, Eddie pushed the tendril out of the way and reached for his cock himself. “Never mind, I’ll do it myself.”

Another one shot out of his hip and wrapped around his wrist, bringing his hand to an abrupt halt before his fingers could make contact. He fought it for a moment, frustrated, then gave in to the inevitable and let his arm go limp. Pulling his hand out of the way, Venom deposited it onto the mattress near his side and retracted the tendril.

“ **I want to do it** ,” he told him firmly. Unnecessarily. Eddie had figured that out already.

“Then do it! I just want to—” The hand Venom had commandeered _finally_ closed around his cock. Eddie inhaled sharply, let his eyes almost close as he felt his fingers tighten and his palm slide down his shaft. It felt good, he half-rocked his hips into his fist to get a little more friction, but it wasn’t quite _right_. “No, I need—Not my hand.”

The movement of his hand paused as Venom tipped his face back to look at him. The question— _Then what?_ —was so clear that it didn’t need to be spoken. Eddie met his eyes. “ _Our_ hand.”

A low, predatory growl rumbled out of Venom but he wasn’t able to focus on it. He could feel his hand shifting, growing larger and stronger, and he could _feel his hand changing_ , rough, imperfection-riddled human skin becoming smooth and flawless around his cock, heightening the sensation as it began moving in frustratingly languid strokes.

“Can you just—” Eddie nudged his hips upward in a mindless bit of helpful nonverbal communication. Knowing he couldn’t always rely on that with an alien, he clarified, “A little faster.”

Venom did not go faster. But he also didn’t stop either, which surely had to count for something. He just canted his head sideways to shoot him a sideways glance. “ **What are the words I should have used?** ”

In Eddie’s defense, there was a lot going on. He couldn’t be expected to have great recall when most of his blood was nowhere near his brain. “What?”

“ **To describe you like this.** ” A gentle squeeze to the head of his cock accompanied the word _this._

“ _Jesus_ ,” Eddie groaned, barely coherent, as he struggled to figure out what he was supposed to say. “I don’t—Hard? I’m hard.”

“ **Hard?** ” Their thumb pressed against the tip of his cock, into the slit, as their fingers tightened in another long, considering squeeze. The moan working its way out of his throat nearly strangled him when Venom offered, “ **You are not hard here, Eddie. Your skin is very soft.** ”

Another squeeze followed, this time around the middle of his shaft. “ _Fuck me_ ,” Eddie cursed under his breath, realizing that the possibility of getting off any time in the next minute or so was dwindling rapidly.

“ **This is what you mean?** ”

“Y-yeah.” Desperation made him ask, “Look, can’t you just get this out of my head?”   

Unsurprisingly, that request went ignored. The inquisitive touch slid lower. Actually slid, providing him with a few glorious seconds of wonderful friction before it left his cock entirely. _What the_ — Their fingertips trailed over his balls, the tips of their razor-sharp claws ghosting harmlessly over his skin as Venom fondled him.

“ **You are very soft here.** ”

Eddie groaned, absently wondering if it was possible to get so turned on that it killed him. Because it felt like Venom was trying to kill him with this. He considered saying something, made a half-hearted attempt to form the start of something that was maybe a demand to hurry the hell up but could’ve been a frustrated plea, and gave up before he got anywhere with it. Their hand was drifting upwards, back to his cock.

Venom dipped in close to his face and licked a drop of sweat off of his temple. “ **You hunger, Eddie,** ” he murmured, the tip of his tongue briefly curling over the edge of Eddie’s chin. “ **It’s delicious.** ”

A thin, too soft sound crept up the back of his throat, disturbingly similar to a whimper. _Definitely trying to kill me_. Parched as his mouth was, Eddie cobbled together enough wherewithal to hiss back at him, “I’m going to starve death at this rate.”

Equating sexual frustration to starvation must have done the trick. Their hand closed around his cock without further messing around and set to pumping up and down the length of it at such a brutally fast pace that he knew it wouldn’t be long. He gave himself over to it, let his hips buck up to meet the downstroke, and came a couple seconds later, gasping for breath. Venom worked him through it, pulling every drop of come out of him until the pleasure ventured too close to unpleasant and Eddie, grunting quietly in discomfort, pushed their hand away.

Distantly, he could feel the darkness receding from his flesh, reshaping it into the hand he’d been born with. It happened gradually, soothingly, as Venom licked more perspiration from his skin.

“All right,” he mumbled after one lick became three. “Stop it. S’gross.”

Huffing in feigned offense, Venom drifted away. Without looking directly at him, Eddie watched him move down his chest to his hand and lick it clean. It wasn’t any more unsettling than it’d been that morning. In the lazy, blissed out post-orgasmic haze, he could even admit it was actually kind of hot. When he was finished, he sank soundlessly into Eddie’s body.

It was a little abrupt, just dismissive enough to sharpen his senses and make him wonder if something was wrong. If _he’d_ done something wrong. “Hey—”

There was no mistaking the feeling of Venom rising up through his skin and enveloping his groin and thighs. His cock was softening, but he could have sworn it managed to give the faintest twitch of interest. _What the hell is going on?_ A moment later, Venom nonchalantly disappeared back inside him as if nothing had happened.

**_Had to clean up_** , came the smug response to his unvoiced question.

Eddie opened his mouth, thought better of what he’d been about to say, and instead opted for a light, “Oh. Right.”

He probably shouldn’t have found any part of that even the slightest bit erotic. It made him wonder, in an abstracted, off-hand way, if there was something broken in him that made him okay with everything that had just happened. And the fact that he didn’t actually care if there was made him wonder even more.  

**_That felt good_**.

Aimless musings interrupted, Eddie hummed a note of agreement. “Yeah, it did.”

**_You enjoyed it. You enjoyed_ ** **us _._**

Drowsiness was settling in, magnified by the low, gravelly murmur of Venom’s voice. “Mm hm,” he agreed, rolling over onto his side and reaching blindly for the sheets.

**_We will do it again._** Fabric nudged against his fingers. He caught it and tugged the handful of sheets and blankets up over his shoulder. **_Tomorrow._**

Eddie yawned. “Sure.”

**_We can do so much more, Eddie._ **

Sleepy though he was quickly becoming, something about that statement penetrated his brain. “Hm?”

**_Tomorrow._ **

“Investigation and dinner tomorrow,” he said. Or tried to. Clinging to consciousness by the thinnest of threads, he couldn’t be sure but he thought it might have come out more garbled and incoherent than it sounded in his head.

**_Afterward. When we get home._ **

That was… Something about that wasn’t right. Not _wrong_ , exactly, but… something. He wasn’t awake enough to figure it out. And that was bad. Because Venom would take it as agreement and _that_ was bad. Because…

Because…

**_Tomorrow_** , Venom insisted softly.

Defeat was soft and dark and very, _very_ nice. “Uh huh,” he conceded, as his thoughts scattered and sank down, down, down into the black. His eyes were closed, but just before he slipped off to sleep, Eddie was almost certain he saw the flash of jagged teeth in a wide, smiling mouth.


	4. Chapter 4

Interviewing the neighbors of the Laurel Heights victims turned out to be even less informative than those of the first victim. Most of the couple’s immediate neighbors had been out when the murders were believed to have occurred and those that had been home hadn’t been able to offer anything useful in identifying or even beginning to put together a profile of the killer. A few individuals had heard the couples’ son shouting, presumably when he discovered the bodies, and everybody present had partaken in a bit of gawking when the first responders had come in to deal with everything. But nobody could remember seeing or hearing anything suspicious that day or the day before. There hadn’t even been a delivery of any sort that anyone had noticed.

Eddie was disappointed, but not exactly surprised. The killer had already proven capable of entering a populated area, murdering someone without any of the neighbors seeing anything, and slipping out with no one the wiser. Although he’d hoped that that hadn’t been the case again, he’d gone into the interviews knowing that the likelihood of a scenario similar to the first killing was fairly high. And from the nothing he got from the neighbors, that was exactly what had happened.

It wasn’t a total loss, though. He might not have any clue as to who the killer was or where to even start looking for potential suspects, but he did know one thing for sure. Whoever it was knew what they were doing. It wasn’t some amateur chasing after a forbidden thrill or someone lashing out in rage. Getting in and out of both neighborhoods without being seen required planning. The killings themselves, while unnecessarily gruesome, were a little too neatly done, too deliberately staged to have been committed in the heat of the moment. 

Admittedly, that didn’t really tell him much. However, on the off-chance that he was successful at locating the dog and managed to use its knowledge to track down the killer, he was prepared for someone who was likely intelligent, calculating, and therefore, dangerous. 

Not, of course, that any of those things would help the killer survive Venom. But it paid to be prepared anyway.

After concluding the interviews, Eddie swung by Mrs. Chen’s on the way home to shoot the shit for a few minutes, make sure nobody else was harassing her, and pick up a quick late lunch. That meant a sandwich for him and a large bar of cheap chocolate for his other. Venom grumbled when they left without purchasing anything else to eat, but Eddie was trying to avoid using his credit card unless it was absolutely necessary. There was a frozen pizza and a few bags of chicken fingers in the freezer he could eat if waiting for dinner was out of the question.

They ate as soon as they got back. Then ate again fifteen minutes later, after Venom demanded the pizza. With time to kill before he had to get ready for dinner, Eddie checked his messages and made some follow-up calls to Richard and his other contacts. Predictably, no news had been bad news: nobody had heard anything about a lost dog, much less a German Shepherd. Richard, more optimistic than Eddie expected someone in his line of work to be, reminded him that it had only been a day and advised him not to lose hope. It was possible that the dog would still be found.

Once the calls were done, he turned on the TV and scanned through the news channels, looking for updates on the Jack O'Lantern case. There were none. Fortunately, there were no new murders, either. He double-checked the internet just to be sure he hadn't missed any developments while he'd been out and when he found nothing, he called it quits for the day. With plenty of time to spare until he had to leave, Eddie drug himself off to take a shower and shave for the first time in probably a week and a half. A  _real_ shave, too. None of the usual half-assed passes with the razor. 

_**What is the purpose of this?** _ Venom asked afterward, while he was standing in front of the sink with a towel around his waist, studying his face in the mirror for any hairs he might have missed.

"What, shaving?" He ran a hand down his cheek and over his chin. Everything felt smooth. "To look good. You know, neat and clean. Well-groomed."

_**What about the rest of it?** _

"Rest of what?" He craned his neck, trying to see if he'd missed any spots under his chin.

_**The rest of the hair on your face.** _

"What h—You mean my eyebrows? No. We don't shave our eyebrows. Well, most people don't."

_**Why not?** _

Eddie shrugged. "Because it looks weird without them." 

_**Is that also why you don't remove the rest of your hair?** _

"On my head?" He glanced at his hair in the mirror. It was starting to get a little long on the top. When he had some extra money, he was going to need to get a haircut sooner than later. "Uh... Yeah. I shaved my head once in college. It wasn't pretty." Actively sharing his memories with Venom wasn't something he'd done much of during their time together, but he made the attempt now, trying to remember as vividly as possible what he'd looked like with a bald head. "Can you see that?"

_**Yes** _ , was his other’s indifferent response.

"Okay, so that's why I don't shave my head. And I'm not a professional swimmer, so I don't have to worry about the hair everywhere else."

He didn't expect Venom to understand what being a professional swimmer had to do with it, but since he'd just affirmed that he wasn't one, he also didn't expect Venom to care. 

_**Why have you not done this before now?** _

"Because it takes time and I don't really care that much. But Anne thinks I'm a mess. That's what the dinner invite was. Pity. She probably thinks I haven't eaten in days. So I figured it'd help if I fixed myself up a little, try to look like I've got my shit together." Which wasn't going to be possible with the epitome of a guy who  _did_ have his shit together sitting across the table from him, but he still wanted to make the attempt.

_**And the amount of hair on your face determines this?** _

"Not really." Sighing, Eddie stepped out of the bathroom and headed to his makeshift closet. "Look, it's just a human perception thing. Being clean-shaven makes a better impression on a lot of people."

Venom mulled that over in silence as Eddie stared bleakly at his wardrobe. A suit was out of the question. He only owned one and if he wore it, it would look like he was trying too hard to impress them. Equally inappropriate was anything from the casual collection of cheap t-shirts and hoodies that made up the bulk of his clothes these days.

_**I can prevent it from returning.** _

"What?"

_**The hair on your face.** _

“You can stop my hair from growing?” Clothes dilemma momentarily forgotten in the wake of this revelation, Eddie put his hands on his hips and cocked his head in disbelief. “Are you shitting me with this?”

A moment of palpable confusion followed that question, dropping silence over them like a shroud. Just about the time he realized what the problem was, Venom must have parsed the meaning of the phrase.  _**You accept the transformation our body without difficulty but you can’t believe this?** _

Put like that, Eddie had to admit he had a point. “No. I mean, that’s not—It’s—You don’t understand.” 

And to be honest, he didn’t really know how to explain it to him. In the grand scheme of things, shaving was nothing compared to turning into a huge, ridiculously strong monster-looking thing that was impervious to bullets and didn’t need to breathe. But having one insane thing happen to him made the equally insane side-effects seem somehow less impossible and more easily acceptable. If he could get possessed by a sentient alien blob of goo that could turn his arms into long-ass tentacles during a fight, was it really so hard to believe that he could take a couple hundred carbine rounds at close range without being hurt? 

Shaving, though, that was a human thing. A normal, mundane part of life, like doing the laundry or taking out the garbage. The sort of chore that he put off for as long as possible until he grudgingly had to do something about it. A life-long nuisance he thought he’d  _always_ have to deal with. Right up until Venom casually offered to make it disappear.

How the hell was he supposed to boil the simple human wonder of it down into something understandable for a creature that viewed traveling between the stars as an uninteresting matter of course? 

“Shaving’s a chore, right? This inconvenient thing humans do because our hair’s always gonna grow back and if we don’t want it, we’ve just gotta live with constantly removing it.” He waved his hand in a grandiose gesture. “And here you are, waltzing in and telling me you can make it go away.” Eddie snapped his fingers. “Just like that. It’s just—Man, I don’t know. It’s just something I never thought I wouldn’t have to do.”

He was half-braced for some sarcastic comment about how inferior humanity was to whatever Venom was, but he was surprised when instead all he got was a thoughtful,  _**I understand.** _ Did he  _really_ ? After the boatload of misunderstandings they’d had thus far in their life together, Eddie hesitated to believe it.  _**You still think of yourself as human.** _

That brought him up short. “Excuse me?”

_**You are different now, Eddie. No longer only human. Just as I am no longer only Klyntar. Together, we are so much more.** _

Eddie got the distinct sense that what Venom was telling him was very important, not just more of the usual weird alien mumbo-jumbo, but he was so hungry for information about his other that he shunted the rest of it aside. “K—Klyntar?” he asked, stumbling over the unfamiliar word. “Is—That’s what your people are called?”

_**Yes.** _ A hint of some unidentifiable emotion came along with the affirmation.

_Klyntar_ , Eddie thought, turning it over in his mind, trying to familiarize himself with it.  _Klyntar. Venom is a Klyntar. Symbiotes are Klyntars? From planet...?_

_**We are Klyntar** _ , came the dry correction. _**We come from Klyntar.** _

"So same word for everything. Right." And because his other was being uncharacteristically forthcoming with actual information, he couldn't resist saying hopefully, "You know you can talk about your people and your planet with me, right? I want to know more about you."

Venom shifted inside of him, a slithery sort of unfurling along his shoulders and down his arms.  _**Why? I'm here now. What came before doesn't matter.** _

"What?" Eddie's eyebrows rose. "Of course it matters! It's your life. It's where you came from. That's important to me. Like how you want to know about humans and Earth and my life before you."

_**I know everything about your life before I found you.** _

He rolled his eyes, huffing in mock indignation. "Yeah, okay, but I can't just root through your memories whenever I want to know something about you the way you can go through mine."

Indecision wasn't something he associated with Venom, but he could sense traces of it now. Curiosity, and the desire to have an equitable exchange of information, urged him to push a little bit harder. He almost did it, too. It was only fair. Except he knew too intimately what it was like to be uncomfortable about sharing something personal and being forced to endure it anyway. Pestering Venom to tell him about his life wasn’t the same as just taking it from his mind, but the principle was the pretty similar. 

And hadn’t Drake taken enough from Venom already? He’d locked him in a cage, fed him into one host after another, and conducted who knew what kind of experiments on him. After visiting the lab and seeing the equipment, Eddie had wondered exactly what had happened in there, but Venom had never volunteered that information and it hadn’t seemed appropriate to ask him to relive those six months of trauma and captivity.

“You don’t _have_ to tell me,” Eddie said quietly, sincerely. “You don’t ever have to tell me. I want to know more about you and I hope that some day you’ll feel comfortable sharing that part of your life with me, but only when you’re ready.”

Another emotion replaced the indecision, though it was far from distinct and impossible to confidently interpret. Not surprise. Not confusion. Something that felt a little like both and a lot like neither.

Recognizing that a change of subject would probably be appreciated, Eddie nodded toward his clothes. “Think you could help me out with this? I’m going for a middle ground, somewhere between homeless and Dan.”

* * *

"All right," Eddie said as he shut off the bike. "Remember what we agreed on?"

_**Not doing anything that would make them suspect I'm still here** _ , Venom replied sullenly, like he was being asked to perform a herculean task that he absolutely despised. Getting his cooperation on the ride over had been a hard won battle, but eventually he'd agreed not to manifest himself in front of Anne or Dan, commandeer Eddie's body for any reason, be disruptive, or demand attention. 

"Right. And in return, I'll figure out a way to eat a little more for you." Doing that was probably going to confirm whatever piss-poor assumptions Anne had about the way he was managing his life, but he would rather that she think he wasn't eating enough than realize that he was still cohabitating with an alien. 

_**More** _ **steak.**

"Only if there  _is_ more steak," Eddie reminded him, dismounting the bike and making his way over to the door. "They might not have extras."

_**They would have if they knew I was here.** _

Eddie was pretty sure Anne wouldn't have invited him to dinner if she knew Venom was still with him, though he tactfully kept that belief to himself. No doubt his other picked it out of his head anyway, but at least he was trying to be considerate. That had to count for something.

He rang the bell, then waited with his hands in his jacket pockets until Dan came down the stairs and opened the door. 

"Hey Eddie," he greeted him, all smiles that seemed sincere. "Glad you could make it. Come on in. Anne's in the kitchen."

Dan held open the door as Eddie stepped in beside him, doing his best to ignore the awkwardness of entering his former home as a stranger. It only intensified as he was ushered up the stairs. The place looked a lot like he remembered it, save for the absence of his stuff and the bits of unfamiliar paraphernalia he spotted laying casually around that hadn't been there seven months ago. A man's wool coat tossed over the arm of the chair in the living room. A medical journal sitting on the corner of the coffee table. A few framed photographs of Dan and Anne scattered tastefully throughout what he could see of the apartment, resting on shelves and the tops of tables and hanging on the walls. 

It made him feel like an intruder. Or a ghost, haunting a life that no longer belonged to him.  _This was such a bad idea._ He should've never agreed to dinner. He'd known it then and he knew it now, felt the certainty so deep in his bones that everything in him wanted to turn around and march right back down the steps and out the door. But he could hear Dan coming up behind him and see Anne up ahead, turning toward the sound of his footsteps.  _Trapped._

_**We could jump out the window** _ .

There was such a markedly deliberate nonchalance to that innocent-sounding offer that the corner of Eddie's lips twitched. Although it was obviously meant as a joke, he knew that if he agreed, Venom would still enthusiastically fling them through the glass and out into the welcoming embrace of the night. And strangely, unexpectedly, that soothed some of the turmoil twisting knots into his stomach.

This life might not belong to him anymore, but he had another one now. A life that was bizarre and exciting, harder in some ways and easier in others, one that he’d come to value as much the one he'd left behind. And although facing the past was still painful, he wasn't doing it alone.

_**You never have to face anything alone.** _

He did smile then, involuntarily, and thankfully, it coincided with Anne meeting his eyes. 

"Eddie, hi!" She smiled back at him, evidently mistaking his expression as a greeting. A moment later, though, her eyes widened in astonishment as she got a good look at him. "Did you shave?"

He gave an exasperated huff. "Why does everybody keep making such a big deal out of it?"

Anne cocked her head. "Who else said something about it?"

_Damn it._ Somehow, he managed not to wince.  _Me and my big mouth._

Amusement trickled through his mind.  _**I thought we weren't supposed to make them suspect I was still here.** _

_Oh, shut up._ "Just the lady that runs the store near my place," he lied, ignoring Venom's dark, velvety chuckle. "She hassles me about something every time she sees me."

A hand clapped him companionably on the shoulder, making him flinch in surprise. “You hungry, man?” Dan asked, moving past him and taking the hand with him. “We’ve got a lot of food. Have a seat.”

Taking an uncertain step toward the dining table, Eddie was brought up short as Anne stepped in front of him. “Let me hang up your jacket.”

“Oh. Uh, sure. Okay.” He shrugged out of it and handed it over, immediately regretting it when she took it. Stupid as it was, he felt naked without it, like he’d gone off to battle without armor.

_**I am our armor, Eddie.** _

Smiling faintly, he knocked his knuckles against chest, just above his heart. And caught Anne watching him. Digging his knuckles into the muscle a little harder, he gave her a wry glance. “Don’t suppose you know any good massage therapists in the area? Really messed up my shoulder yesterday.”

She shook her head. “No, but Dan can take a look at it after dinner.”

Making a face, Eddie shook his head. “Hm? No. That’s not—I think Dan’s done enough for me lately, huh?”

_**You are really bad at this.** _

She didn’t look convinced, but instead of pressing the issue, she asked mildly, “Beer or wine?”

Despite the usual protest every time he reached for a beer, Venom was curiously silent when Eddie thought a question mark at him as clearly as he could. “Beer. Thanks,” he replied, taking the lack of opposition as permission to drink without having to listen to a litany of complaints.  _Thanks, man. I owe you some more Tastykakes._

And because it involved food, of course Venom heard it.  _**Get some on the way home?** _

How much money did he have in his wallet? He couldn’t remember.  _That’s a solid maybe_ .

Anne was back seconds later to put an open bottle of Anchor Steam into one of his empty hands. It’d been a while—going on seven months now—since he’d last had one of those, his casual drinking confined by necessity to the cheaper PBR. He took a sip and grinned in appreciation as the smooth richness of it flowed over his tongue. “Been awhile.”

A few seconds passed as she studied him, like she was trying to put together the pieces of a particularly difficult puzzle. Finally, she gave him a soft smile. “You look good, Eddie.”

No thanks to Venom. He might have been relieved they’d moved beyond the topic of his past, but he’d still been zero help at picking out clothes earlier. Human fashion interested him less than human laws and societal expectations, and with his ability to transform into anything, he found his host’s continued dependency on man-made garments somewhat insulting. Yet Eddie had been fully aware that dinner was going to be enough of a trial already. He hadn’t wanted to tempt fate by outright wearing Venom to it, no matter how convincingly he could replicate a nicely tailored outfit. The old stand-by, black jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt, had to suffice.

“Thanks.” Lips quirking into a half-smile, he joked back, “Put on my Sunday best and everything.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “I mean it.”

He knew that. He also knew that she wasn’t referring to his clothes. 

“Yeah, well.” Shrugging, he pulled out a chair from in front of one of the place settings and sat down, resolutely refusing to acknowledge the furniture as anything other than a very generic concept of chair at an equally generic table. Not his. _His_ table was a tiny thing barely big enough for the mail he occasionally threw onto it and the poor plant that was gently dying by the dirty window. “Not dying’ll do that for you.”

Further awkward conversation was forestalled by Dan’s arrival with a large platter of T-bone steaks. Much to his other’s easily discernible delight, there were half a dozen of them. Eddie’s mouth almost immediately started to water, though whether that was due to the delicious aroma of seared meat or Venom’s influence was anybody’s guess. 

“I hope medium rare’s okay?” Dan set the platter down and gestured over his shoulder. “If not, I can throw a couple back on for a few minutes.”

_**The bloodier the better** _ .

“Nah, man,” Eddie replied, waving the offer away. “Medium rare’s fine with me.”

_**Eat more than one** _ , Venom urged him, as Anne and Dan finished bringing over the rest of the food.  _**There’s more than enough. You promised.** _

_I know._ Eddie lifted the bottle to his mouth, disguising the barest nod of agreement as taking a sip of his beer. They’d made six of the things. Surely they wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t intend for most of them to be eaten. He knew that Anne wouldn’t have more than one, but maybe Dan was a big eater. He had to be, right? He was tall, fit, and he was a doctor, so presumably he worked long hours and spent most of them on his feet. Probably had the human equivalent of Venom’s appetite.

Distaste pricked at his mind.  _**I am nothing like him.** _

Eddie hid a smile behind another sip of beer while his hosts for the evening sat down. At a  _help yourself_ gesture from Anne, he speared one of the steaks with his fork and transferred it onto his plate. As he loaded up on sides—sweet potatoes, some kind of grilled zucchini salad, parmesan-encrusted broccoli, and a cheddar biscuit—he kept a subtle eye on what was going onto Dan’s plate and tried to keep his own servings to a comparable size. Like he was a perfectly normal, well-fed human being without a bottomless pit masquerading as an alien for a stomach. Once or twice he felt Venom trying to nudge his hands toward the leftover steaks sitting temptingly close by, but it was never obvious enough that anyone noticed.

_Just let me finish what I’ve got before you start angling for seconds!_ It was difficult to do the mental equivalent of hollering the thought at Venom without looking like he was concentrating on something, so Eddie busied himself with cutting a piece off the steak and taking a bite. 

Venom settled down after that and dinner proceeded with surprisingly little disruption. Conversation flowed between them all more naturally than Eddie had been anticipating. Dan seemed to be genuinely interested in his work, lending more weight to the claim that he'd been a fan, and asked about his current projects. There wasn't much to tell him with the murders taking up most of his attention, but Eddie shared a few details about his struggle to get useful information out of the victims' neighbors and the equally fruitless dog search. Not wanting to monopolize the discussion or open the door for questions he might not be able to answer without having to dance around Venom's presence, he asked about any interesting developments in their lives as soon as he was able to do it and was relieved when Dan and Anne traded off telling anecdotes about their own work.

He’d been expecting to feel like a third wheel, awkward and out of place, or like a charity case that was only being tolerated because the alternative was worse than putting up with him, but the discomfort never actually manifested. They included him in the conversation like he belonged there, each other them exchanging friendly glances with him like it was second-nature. Like he was a welcome part of their lives instead of an unpleasant burden. And as he watched the two of them interact from his side of the table, the pangs of loneliness and loss he’d been afraid of feeling were conspicuously absent. He wasn’t jealous of Dan for being the recipient of Anne’s fond smiles and he didn’t mourn the inside jokes he no longer shared with her. He didn’t really feel much of anything, except a little weird that he wasn’t feeling any of the things he’d been bracing himself for. 

And maybe, if he was being completely honest, he felt a teeny tiny bit of envy, too. But not because Dan had Anne or they were obviously very much in love with each other. He just wished he could openly involve Venom in the conversation. Sure, his other was listening, but it would’ve been nice to be able to make random comments to him throughout the conversation or include him in the jokes the rest of them exchanged.

Midway through the meal, Dan took notice of the state of Eddie’s plate—the remainder of a large spoonful of the broccoli and the bone from the steak, picked clean of meat—and gestured expansively to the leftover steaks. "Want another? We've got plenty."

_**Yes!** _ Venom bellowed, so loud that Eddie couldn't quite suppress a startled flinch. 

"Uh..." He barely got started and already he could feel his other's singular focus narrowing in on his mouth, an implicit threat to usurp control if he dared refuse the offer. "Yeah. Sure." 

Dan helpfully transferred the second slab of meat onto his plate, waving off Eddie’s awkward protest that he could do it himself. Glancing up, he caught Anne watching him over the rim of her wine glass. He met her eyes and gave her a sheepishly lopsided smile. Better that she think he was just embarrassed about being poor and hungry than actively trying to discourage Venom from loudly demanding the rest of the food.

"Eddie." There was something disturbingly ominous about the tiny  _click_ the glass made as she set it down on the table. "Have you given any thought to investigating the disappearances?"

He almost choked on the forkful of broccoli he'd just shoved into his mouth. "Sorry, what?" Clearing his throat, he took a quick swig of beer. "What disappearances?"

Her eyebrows rose. "Oh, haven't you heard?"

"Um..." He glanced at Dan, but his curious expression provided no clues on what she was talking about. Shaking his head, he looked back to her. "No. What's going on?"

"I don't know. During a recent interview, one of my clients mentioned someone going missing. At first I didn't think anything of it, but I've had two others from separate cases say the same thing."

"You think it's connected to the Jack O'Lantern killings?" 

She tipped one shoulder in a shrug. "Maybe. Or maybe there's someone else out there hunting people too."

It was entirely possible that her choice of phrasing contained no deeper meaning, that it was just a way to express the continued disappearance of some part of the city’s population. If it hadn’t been Anne saying it, Eddie might’ve believed that it was as incidental as all that. But she was too shrewd. Nothing about it was accidental and he knew it. She knew he knew it. 

Blood running cold, Eddie licked his lips and set the bottle down. “Okay.” He nodded, feigning professional interest. “Sure. I’ll do a little research when I get home. See what I can find about disappearances in the city. See if there are any connections, similarities. Maybe there’s a story there.”

And if there was, he was going to have to do something about it. Rethink how they dealt with criminals, maybe. Start going a little further afield when Venom’s ravenous appetite demanded satiation. Something. Because if there was enough information out there—whispers, rumors, unsubstantiated claims, whatever—that Anne was starting to get suspicious, eventually other people would too. Even those who didn’t already know anything about the existence of man-eating alien symbiotes.

_**Eddie? What’s going on?** _

“Thanks for the heads-up,” he continued, picking up the bottle again and tipping it in Anne’s direction like a salute. “I’ll credit you if it turns into a story.”

Blithely taking a gulp of beer, he ignored her dry stare and the discontent at being ignored roiling off of Venom. There was no way he could cop to the thinly veiled accusation of involvement she was leveling at him and he couldn’t properly respond to Venom’s questioning until they were alone. All he  _could_ do was get through dinner without arousing suspicions and take the first opportunity to make his exit.

Hoping to change the subject, he casually turned to Dan. “How about you? Anything interesting you’re hearing at the hospital that you think I oughta look into? Outbreaks? Lax safety standards at Google? I can—”

Someone’s phone rang, cutting him off. Almost as one, they reacted. Dan reached for his pocket, Anne turned toward the kitchen counter, and Eddie glanced down at his lap. It was coming from him. 

“Sorry,” he muttered, slipping it from his pocket and glancing at the number. It wasn’t one that he recognized, making it either a telemarketer or one of the numerous people he’d given his number to during the past forty-eight hours. He almost let it go to voicemail, then abruptly changed his mind. Getting up from the table, he gave his hosts an apologetic smile. “Excuse me for a sec. Might be something important.”

“Sure,” Anne replied agreeably. “Take your time.”

Stepping away from the table, he tapped the answer icon. “Yeah?”

“Mister Brock?” a mostly unfamiliar woman’s voice asked uncertainly.

Eddie shuffled into the kitchen, seeking the illusion of privacy and unobtrusiveness without inappropriately wandering off into the apartment. “Yeah, it’s me.”

“It’s Heather,” she said helpfully. “From yesterday. You interviewed me about my neighbor’s death.”

Venom stirred irritably in his chest.  _**What does she want?** _

_Not now_ , he thought desperately. “Oh hey. Yeah. What’s up?”

“I found her dog.” 

He froze in the middle of turning his back on the dining table. “You did?”

“Yeah, he came back this afternoon. I found him on her porch, sitting by the door. Brought him inside and gave him some food and water.” She gave a little sigh. “I think he’s been wandering around the neighborhood. He was really tired and his foot was bleeding a little.”

“But he’s okay?” Eddie turned back around, searching for his coat. From the corner of his eye, he could see Dan and Anne intently not looking him in the terribly unconvincing act of busy innocence that was the hallmark of eavesdroppers everywhere. “You still have him?”

“Sure do. Haven’t let him out of my sight. Figured once I made sure he wasn’t badly injured I’d give you a call. You’re the only one who’s shown any interest in him.”

“No, that’s great. _Great_. Thank you. We’ll be right there.” He took two automatic steps toward the window, operating purely on adrenaline and instinct, before he remembered that Venom couldn’t go crashing through the glass. Anne and Dan were openly looking at him now. “Er, as soon as we can. I’m, uh, right in the middle of dinner. Is it okay if I come by afterward?”

“Of course!” Heather replied brightly. “It’s no trouble. I’ll be home all night.” 

Nodding even though he knew she couldn’t see him, he drifted back toward the table. “Okay. Thanks. Sorry for the—I’ll be over as soon as I’m done here.”

“Just ring the bell when you get here. And take your time, all right? We aren’t going anywhere.”

“Yeah. Yeah, all right. Thanks, Heather. I’ll see you soon.” Disconnecting the call, Eddie put the phone into his pocket and looked up. Anne was still watching him. Dan was making a valiant attempt to pretend he was too occupied spreading butter on a biscuit to have been paying any attention to anything. “What?”

Anne’s eyebrows rose, her expression a mixture of curiosity and almost gleeful interest that he just knew boded ill for him. “So, who’s Heather?”

_Oh no._ Eddie managed not to flinch only by virtue of being able to bury the movement in the act of resuming his seat. “Oh, just a source.”

“A source?”

“Mmhm,” he nodded, slicing off a chunk of meat in an effort to get ahead of any jealous tantrums his other might be thinking of throwing. “Yeah, she found the dog I was looking for.”

“Oh, good!” The brightness in her voice was at odds with the sly calculation in her eyes. “And she called you right away.”

“Yep.” There was no way out of it. He knew where it was going and short of abruptly leaving, he couldn’t escape it. “Because I gave her my number to call me if she had any more information about the murder.”

“That all it was?”

A low growl of dark displeasure rumbled through him. Eddie plastered the blankest, most innocent expression onto his face and tried to radiate that same innocence through every fiber of his being. The likelihood of it convincing either of them to drop it was slim to nil, but damned if he didn’t try. “Of course. I’m a professional. Handing out numbers to possible sources is a very professional thing to do.”

“Is she cute?”

“That’s—” Eddie shook his head, clicking his tongue. “That’s not a professional thing to ask, Anne. Or do.”

The weight of Venom’s presence seemed to grow heavier, more concentrated along his shoulders and arms. It trickled down his sides, the sensation of motion defined enough that he couldn’t tell if it was happening under his skin or on top of it. 

Her mouth curved into a smile. “Good thing I’m not your boss, huh?”

It was a mark of how far they’d come since the dissolution of their romantic relationship that Anne felt comfortable poking and prying and teasing him about his love life. That she obviously didn’t hate him anymore and considered him enough of a friend to treat him like one meant more to him than he could process in that moment. Because yes, he’d missed his girlfriend, his fiancée, but the greater, infinitely more shattering loss had been thinking that he’d lost his friend. And it said something about him too that none of it hurt the way it probably would have just a month ago.

“You know,” Dan began, pausing in the middle of lifting his biscuit to his mouth. “We could all go out sometime. Have dinner somewhere.”

Could it really be called betrayal if a guy was siding with his girlfriend? It sure as hell felt like it to Eddie. “No. What? We’re already having dinner.”

“I meant the four of us,” he clarified helpfully as he made a circular gesture with his biscuit. “Anne and I. You and your friend. Like a double date.”

Unable to decide whether he wanted to splutter in indignation at the assumption that he wanted to date the woman or laugh at the hilarity of technically being on a double date  _right now_ and neither Dan nor Anne being aware of it, Eddie could only make a strangled sort of coughing sound. “That’s not—I mean, I appreciate the thought, but I’m not...”

_**Double date?** _ Venom’s curiosity was almost palpable, indicating that at any moment, he was going to go through Eddie’s memories looking for more information.

“Might be fun,” Dan commented lightly.

“What’s the matter?” Anne asked, dark eyes just a little too intent as they studied Eddie’s. “We could keep it casual. No pressure for you.”

_**No!**_ From the snarl, it sounded like he’d figured out the purpose of a double date. _**No double dates! You’re**_ **mine.**

“ _I know!_ ” Eddie blurted out, only realizing how forcefully it came out when Anne blinked in surprise. _Damn it._ Clearing his throat, he said more normally, “I know. Look. Yes, she’s cute, but _no_ , I’m not interested in dating her. At all. Ever.” The emphasis was for Venom’s benefit, though he figured it wouldn’t hurt to make that plain to Anne as well. “I’m not—I’ve got enough going on. Dating isn’t really something I’m—I want to do.”

They were both looking at him. He didn’t know Dan well enough to be able to read his expression, but Anne looked concerned. Or worried.  He wasn’t sure  which it was. And although Venom wasn’t saying anything, there was a heavy sense of expectation inside him, like his other was waiting for something. Eddie had no idea what that was or whether that too alert silence was good or bad. But with all the attention focused on him, he did the only thing he could think of to do and like a jackass, opened his stupid fucking mouth.

“I’m not interested in other people.” He meant to reassure all of them—let Dan and Anne know that he was perfectly fine not dating anyone, let Venom know that he wasn’t looking to bring another person into their life—but the second it came out, he knew it was the wrong thing to say. 

Something flashed across Anne’s face, too fast to decipher. “Eddie...” 

“No! No, not—“ He waved his hand dismissively, glancing frantically between them both. “Not because I’m still hung up on you, Anne. I’m not. I swear.” To Dan specifically, he added, “I’m not trying to—I don’t want to come between you. That’s not what I meant. I just—I’m _fine._ I have. What I have is enough. I don’t need anyone else.”

Proving once again that he wasn’t human, Dan smiled gently at him, radiating understanding. “We just want you to be happy, Eddie.”

“I am. I _am_ ,” he repeated, as Anne opened her mouth to argue with him. “Really.”

“You don’t have to be alone, Eddie,” she said softly.

_**You aren’t alone.** _

“I’m not.” As her eyebrows rose, he hastily added, “I’ve got plenty of friends.” He gestured to them both. “You guys, for example.”

“Eddie.”

“What, Anne? I’m serious.”

She shook her head, sighing so heavily that he knew she was disappointed in him. Which was silly and honestly, a little offensive. He opened his mouth to tell her that—maybe not the offensive part but definitely the silly part—but the would-be words turned into a yelp as she unceremoniously hurled her steak knife at him. Jerking backward, nearly tipping the chair over, Eddie flung up his arms and ducked behind them, bracing for pain. 

It never came. 

After a few incredibly tense seconds, as his heart pounded deafeningly in his ears, he cautiously lowered his arms. Dan was staring at him, wide-eyed. But Anne was giving him that level, unimpressed look that meant she was thoroughly unsurprised at having caught him in the middle of his bullshit. Because there was a tendril protruding from his shoulder and the tip of it was wrapped around the knife, holding it a safe distance from his body. 

He exhaled so hard that he slumped down in his chair. “Shit.”

_**Sorry, Eddie. Couldn’t let you get hurt.** _

“S’okay, buddy,” he muttered, no longer having a reason not to talk to him. _Guess it’s time to face the music._ He looked across the table, meeting Anne and Dan’s eyes in turn. “I can explain this.”

Anne didn’t give him a chance. “I  _knew_ it. I  _knew_ you still had him! Why didn’t you just tell me?”

Dan’s surprise was giving way to professional concern. “Eddie, are you sure you’re all right? The last time you had that thing, you—”

Venom slammed the knife down onto the table.  _**Not a thing!** _

“Uh, he’s...” Eddie held up a placating hand. “His name’s Venom.”

_**I’m not hurting you. Tell him!** _

“I’m fine. Really. He isn’t—That whole dying thing a couple weeks ago was a mistake. He didn’t mean it.” Dan wasn’t looking convinced. Eddie tried again. “He fixed it. I’m probably healthier now that I’ve ever been.”

“Maybe you should come into the hospital tomorrow. Just to—”

“ **No!** ”Venom snarled through Eddie’s mouth, ripping control away from him so violently that he wouldn’t have been able to stop him even if he’d been prepared for it. “ **No hospitals.** ”

Dan jerked backward as far as his chair would allow, no doubt remembering what had happened the last time he'd encountered the symbiote. He eyed Eddie warily, but when it became clear that he wasn't going to come over the table and throttle him again, he slowly lifted his hands in surrender and said cautiously, his tone calm and soothing, "All right. No hospitals."

Anne wasn’t so forgiving. “Back off,” she snapped, leaning forward and pointing straight at his chest. “Eddie.” She jabbed her finger down at the top of the table, an unmistakable demand that Venom let him talk again. “Right now.”

Surprisingly, it worked. The stranglehold on his vocal chords disappeared  as the tendril receded into his body.  Eddie immediately cleared his throat and held up his hands, trying to appear as harmless as possible. “Sorry. I’m sorry.  _Really_ sorry. That wasn't—He really doesn’t like hospitals.”

Inside, however, he was seething.  _You promised you wouldn’t pull shit like that tonight. But you had to go and scare Dan anyway, after he made us dinner and welcomed us into his home. They actually want to be our friends! I think. God knows why, because I sure as hell don't. But they’re going to hate us if you keep scaring them like that._

Something that felt similar to discomfort shivered through him. Not guilt, but something somewhere in the vague vicinity of it.  _**Sorry, Eddie.** _

“How long has he been back?” Anne asked, frowning at him. No, Eddie realized. At _them_. "The truth this time."

“Uh...” He shook his head helplessly. “The whole time? He was… The explosion took a lot out of him. I couldn’t feel him there for a while, thought he was gone, but he was just recuperating.”

“And you didn’t tell me,” she finished flatly.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea,” he protested. He glanced briefly at Dan, whose posture seemed to be tentatively relaxing now that the inhuman snarling had stopped. “I thought it’d be safer if you didn’t know. If nobody knew. You have a life here. A normal life. Careers. Both of you. I didn’t want to jeopardize that. If I told you and something happened, if you got caught up in something dangerous because of it, I...” He searched Anne’s eyes, earnest and beseeching. “I couldn’t ruin your life again.”

Some of the hardness left her gaze. “I can handle it, Eddie. I thought you knew that.  _We_ can handle it. Dan and I, we’re already involved anyway.”

“I know, but if you thought he was gone, then...” But she hadn’t thought Venom was gone, had she? Eddie squinted at her. “But you didn’t, did you? You knew he was still here.”

“I suspected.” When he frowned, she rolled her eyes. “You’ve been acting pretty squirrelly, Eddie.”

Not ready to concede that she was right with that one, he looked at Dan. “Did you know too?”

“Anne and I talked about it,” Dan replied diplomatically, then glanced pointedly at the leftover steaks. “That’s why we made so much food.”

“You set me up?” Eddie squawked indignantly, leaning back from the table like it had just burned him. “Seriously?” 

_**Is that food for me? Is that what he’s saying?** _

Anne snorted. “Oh, please. Like you would’ve told us the truth if we’d asked.”

“Yes, the food’s for you. And _no_ , Anne, I wouldn’t have told you. That’s not the point. The _point_ is that I was trying to protect you.” Eddie’s hand started to reach across the table, only to noticeably pause halfway to the plate where the remaining steaks sat as Venom remembered the no  hijacking the body rule. “Go ahead, it’s fine,” he said under his breath, ignoring the looks he was getting. 

At least Dan was looking less alarmed and more fascinated with each passing minute. “How much can you eat?”

Steak secured, Venom deposited it on Eddie’s plate, right on top of the barely-eaten second one.  _**Eat more, Eddie.** _

“I don’t know if it’s _me_ exactly,” he said, obediently sawing off a hunk of meat and stuffing it into his mouth. He chewed quickly, then swallowed it. “He’s always hungry. Usually I let him do the eating himself, but uh, you know, now’s not really a good time for that.”

“Venom’s why you want to find the dog, isn’t he?” Anne broke in, her voice too certain for it to be a real question.

“Yeah,” Eddie admitted, quickly scarfing down a few more bites of steak before his other could complain. “The neighbor you want to fix me up with so bad thinks the dog might’ve seen the killer. I thought he could dig around in the dog’s brain, find an image that we could use to catch whoever’s doing it.”

“What are you going to do with it after you’re done searching its memories?” The way she said it made it sound like she half expected him to say he was going to let Venom eat it. 

“Try to contact the family. See if they want it back.” 

He really didn’t have much choice. He’d used that reasoning on too many people. If he found the dog and didn’t make an effort to reunite it with the victim’s family, his credibility would be shot. Plus, it was a dog. People had a lot of strong opinions on dogs. He didn’t need anybody thinking he was some kind of heartless monster for dumping it in a shelter somewhere. 

_**More eating, less talking. Before he changes his mind.** _

“Dan’s not going to do that,” Eddie replied, shaking his head when Dan lifted an eyebrow. “He's worried you're going to take the food away.”

"So he's talking to you right now? In your head?"

Eddie nodded. "Yep. All the time." There was still a lot of food on his plate, more than half of it meat, but despite knowing that Venom wasn't going to like it, he set his silverware down and looked at his hosts. "Hey, listen. Since you know what's really going on now, is it okay if I get going early? Not that I don't appreciate everything tonight. I do.  _We_ do. But if there's a chance I can get an ID on the killer, I want to do it as soon as possible."

"Of course," Anne said as Dan nodded. She tipped her chin toward his plate. "You want me to wrap that up for you?"

_**Yes! All of it!** _

Venom's enthusiastic volume made him wince. "Uh, yes please. If it's not too much trouble."

Waving that away, Anne stood up, collected his plate and the platter, and headed off to the kitchen. Having played host to Venom for a few hours, it wasn't surprising that she was taking his continued presence  with such aplomb . What Eddie hadn't been expecting was how coolly Dan was accepting it.  After the episode in the hospital, he’d thought there would have been more freaking out.  _Definitely not human. No way in hell._

The possible alien in question was leaning toward Eddie, his expression an odd combination of concern, interest, and maybe a little curiosity. "You know you can talk to us, don't you, Eddie? About anything." When he nodded, Dan continued earnestly, "And if you're ever in trouble, if you're hurt and your...um...your friend can't fix it, you can come to me. I'll help you.  _Without_ MRIs or any other machines that make a lot of noise. Okay?"

Eyeing him suspiciously for a moment, Eddie finally snorted in disbelief. "You sure you're human, Dan?"

Damned if the guy didn't grin. "Last time I checked."

_Un-fucking-real_ . 

A hand touched his shoulder. "Here you go." Anne held out a bundle wrapped up neatly inside a plastic bag. "All the leftover steak and a surprise for your buddy."

_**What? What surprise?** _

Ignoring him, Eddie took the bag with a grateful smile. "Thanks, Anne. Dan. Sorry about the whole... you know. Everything."

_**Eddie. What's the surprise?** _

Dan rose from the table. "You feeling up to doing this again sometime?"

"What?" Halfway to his feet, Eddie paused in surprise. "You want to do this again?"

"Yeah. For real next time. With both you."

Eddie stared at him like he'd sprouted a symbiote of his own, then turned his bewildered stare on Anne.  _What?_ He tried to get the word out, but it felt like his face had forgotten how to work. 

She patted him consolingly on the shoulder. "You're kind of a package deal, Eddie." Then her mouth twisted into a  teasing smirk. "Consider it a double date."

A thrum of contentment rippled through Eddie's body.  _**I still like her.** _

"I don't..."  _Know what the hell to say_ . He looked between the two of them, floundering in th e unexpected flood of  unbelievable  acceptance. 

Anne gave him another pat, this one seemingly just a tad patronizing, like she thought he was being an idiot on purpose. "I'll get your coat."

He watched her disappear into the side room, then trailed  dazedly along with Dan as he walked him toward the door. Like they were two perfectly normal guys who might at some point actually be friends. Like Dan  _wanted_ to be his friend. He couldn't get his head around it. Not just because of the whole alien thing, though that was a huge hurdle on its own, but also because of the ex thing. Everything about Eddie was a cautionary tale practically screaming a warning at everybody to stay as far away as possible, and yet right here was a guy who had every reason to heed it doing the exact opposite. It made no sense. 

Maybe he should've accepted it gratefully and kept his mouth shut, but he'd never been good at doing either. If he had, he probably wouldn't have been anywhere near where he was.

"You know he's an alien, right?" Eddie asked softly, unable to help himself. "Bona fide alien. From outer space. And you're, you're okay with that?"

Instead of answering him, Dan volleyed back a question of his own. "Can I let you in on a little secret?"

"Uh, yeah. Sure." Was this it? Was he finally going to tell him that he was really from some other planet? Maybe a planet full of people that lived alongside the Klyntar and already knew everything about them?

_**There is no such planet** _ .

" _E.T._ was my favorite movie as a kid," he told him in a low, conspiratorial voice. "Grew up hoping I'd meet an alien some day. Never did stop believing in them. With the universe as big as it is, how could they not exist?" He shrugged. It looked almost self-conscious. "Guess I'd just like to get to know him a little better. You know, if he doesn't mind not strangling me again."

_**What's wrong with him?** _ Venom asked suspiciously.

Unable to help himself, Eddie chuckled. "I don't know, man." At Dan's curious look, he twitched a shoulder. "He's, uh..."

_**Fine.** _ It was the most skeptical agreement he had ever heard. _**I won't do that again.** _

"He said he won't do it again."

Dan brig htened . "Well, okay then." And then the  crazy  son of a bitch held out his hand. "Nice to meet you, Venom."

_**What is he doing?** _

With a sheepish smile at Dan, Eddie glanced sideways at nothing and said quietly, "He wants to shake your hand. It's uh, a customary human greeting." He got the distinct sense that Venom was as bewildered by the whole thing as he was. "Or, well, my hand, I guess. You can—"

Without waiting for him to finish, Venom extended a tendril from his side and curled it around that offered hand. To his credit, Dan didn't flinch. He got a little wide around the eyes and seemed to be holding his breath, but he didn't look  _afraid_ , per se. If Eddie had to take  a stab at categorizing it , he would've had to label his expression as something akin to wonder. 

_**Am I doing this right? Tell him** _ _**I said** _ _**hello.** _

He tried his best to suppress the smile, but it got away from him in the end. "He, uh, he says hello."

Ever the trooper, Dan gave the tendril a shake. "Hi."

"I'm not even going to ask," Anne announced  wryly , walking up behind them.

As she handed over the jacket, Venom pulled away from Dan and plucked the bag out of Eddie's hand. Foreseeing where that was going, he shook his head and quickly shrugged into the jacket so that he could snatch it back. "Leave it alone until we get home. You can wait."

_**Still hungry, Eddie.** _

"Never a dull moment with you," Anne murmured dryly, though there was no denying the affection—very innocent, perfectly platonic affection—in her voice. "Go on. Go get your dog. Try not to eat everybody on your way there."

Eddie blinked, caught off-guard by the casual way she threw that joke out there.  His gaze skittered over to Dan, but he didn’t look horrified or repulsed either. Had she not told him about that particular quirk of Venom’s dietary habits? Did he assume she was joking?  _Was_ she joking? She couldn’t possibly be serious.

“Uh,” he started, knowing that he needed to say _something_ to that but at a n utter loss. “What, uh...”

“I meant what I said earlier,” she told him soberly, looking him directly in the eyes. “People are going missing. Maybe they weren’t the best people, but it isn’t going unnoticed. Be careful.”

It was all too much process. This. Their reactions when Anne had forced Venom to reveal himself. The discovery of the dog. The slow, sneaking slide of realization that had been creeping over him every second he’d been forced to confront the juxtaposition of his old life and his new one. Eddie couldn’t deal with all of it at once. Not without making a mess of everything.

_ Dog first. Then Dan and Anne. Then the disappearances.  _ He didn’t bother actively acknowledging the other thing. It would probably take him  a long time to sort through the rest of it.  That could keep just a little while longer.

“Yeah,” he agreed, in lieu of anything intelligent to say. “Sure. And thanks again.” He smiled at them both, lifting the leftover in emphasis. “For everything.”

He was halfway down the stairs when Anne called out to him. “And let us know what happens with the dog!”

Raising a hand, he returned a brisk, “Will do.”

Another round of good nights and companionable shoulder claps were exchanged with Dan at the door, weirdly awkward to Eddie for a whole new set of reasons now. Then he was out the door and onto the sidewalk. It had gotten considerably cooler while he’d been inside. Tucking the leftovers in against his chest as securely as he could, he zipped up his jacket and headed over to where he’d parked.

“Ready to try to solve some murders?” he asked as he settled onto the bike and turned it on.

_**Leftovers and surprise after?** _

“You bet. Those Tastykakes too, if you’re still in the mood for them.”

_**Stupid.** _

“Right.” As if there’d been any doubt. “Tastykakes too.”

Releasing the clutch, Eddie rolled on the throttle and took off down the street. A few minutes with the dog, a quick stop at the convenience store for the promised donuts, a couple phone calls when they got home, and then he could chill out on the couch for the rest of the night. Maybe have another beer while Venom devoured the remains of dinner.

It was a simple plan. A nice, neat end to a not intolerable evening.

And really, by now, he should’ve known better.


	5. Chapter 5

It wasn't until he was standing in the middle of Heather's very stylish, extremely neat living room, staring at the potential witness curled up on a blanket in the corner, that Eddie realized there was a huge fucking hole in his plan. Without a significant distraction, there was no way to surreptitiously transfer Venom to and from the dog. Asking her to leave him alone with it for a few minutes was absolutely out of the question and every other option that crossed his mind was equally ludicrous. He couldn't invite her out for a drink without sending the wrong message and the somewhat more platonic offer of a cup of coffee wasn't going to fly after eight o'clock in the evening. A handsome protagonist in a slick television drama might apply some seduction to the problem, diverting attention away from what was really going on and having a pleasant time doing so, but Eddie wasn't suave enough to pull something like that off.

Perhaps more importantly, he also wasn’t interested. 

Heather was undeniably attractive, and in another life, maybe he would've considered attempting to ferret out if the earlier flirtation had a chance of going anywhere. But Venom's presence prohibited him from getting involved with other people, jealous possessiveness notwithstanding. He couldn’t risk revealing his secrets or drawing another person into his life. It wasn’t safe for any of them. And beyond the practical concerns was the personal one: he simply didn’t _want_ to do it.

Which left him shifting his weight from one foot to the other, hands buried in his jacket pockets, looking at a dog that seemed content to ignore him, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with it now.

“So, uh, how’s he been?” Eddie asked, stalling for time as he desperately hoped that some brilliant idea would come to him if he just waited long enough.

“It’s weird, right?” Heather replied with a rueful smile, evidently misinterpreting his question as a remark on the disinterested way the dog was behaving. “I think it’s because of whatever’s wrong with him. Whenever I saw him out with Autumn, he never seemed very interested in interacting with people. They’d approach him and he’d shy away.”

“A dog that doesn’t like people?” He slanted a glance her way. “You think that’ll impact her family wanting to take him?”

The last thing he needed was to get saddled with a dog nobody wanted. _He_ certainly couldn’t keep it. Between the odd hours he kept, his unstable income situation, and the ravenous alien complicating his life, he wasn’t fit to have a pet. Anne and Dan were managing all right with a cat, but Mr. Belvedere was pretty low maintenance. Their schedules were even more erratic than Eddie’s; he couldn’t foist the dog off onto them either. 

Heather shook her head. “Nah, I think it’ll be fine. I met her folks in passing a few times. They seemed like good people.”

That was one potential problem possibly solved, but the more immediate one was still there. _I don_ _’_ _t suppose invisibility_ _’_ _s something you can do too?_ Eddie thought, on the off-chance that Venom was monitoring his mind for incriminating Heather-related thoughts and would pick up on it. He didn’t have much hope for a yes, though. If that was one of the skills in the symbiote’s repertoire, surely he would have paraded it out during any of the numerous times that becoming invisible would’ve gotten them out of trouble.

**_Camouflage, yes. Invisibility, no._** But that _was_ a yes on the whole thought-monitoring. Eddie resisted the impulse to roll his eyes. **_And I would need a host for that. What is the problem? Bring the dog with us._**

Easier said than done. _Can_ _’_ _t bring a dog on a motorcycle, buddy._ He tried to accompany the thought with a mental image of failing to find a place to put the large dog on his bike, but he wasn’t sure he succeeded. That was a level of sophisticated psychic communication he didn’t think he’d achieved yet.

But there were workarounds to that dilemma, weren’t there? He could leave the bike where it was parked and call an Uber to take them all back to the apartment. _If_ , of course, he could find a driver that didn’t mind transporting a large dog and he had enough cash in his wallet to cover the cost. Another option was calling Anne and asking for a ride, though Eddie was loath to do that. None of this was her responsibility and no matter how friendly they were with one another now, he didn’t want to start infringing on her.

Something like exasperation trickled through his mind. **_I know where we live. I can bring the dog back._**

_What?_ He hadn’t even considered that. But Venom had done it before, hadn’t he? Taken a dog to find Anne and then had somehow gotten Anne to take him to the Life Foundation to prevent Eddie from getting shot in the face. Navigating a couple miles of city streets to get back home couldn’t possibly be harder than that. Provided that the symbiote didn’t get peckish on the way and accidentally eat the dog.

**_Will not eat the dog_** , came the indignant reply.

“You think he’ll come with me?” With any luck, she’d think he’d been silent for so long mulling over his chances of getting an uncooperative dog to behave. “Without, I don’t know, biting me or getting traumatized or anything?”

Heather grinned in sympathetic understanding. “I think you’ll be fine.” She crossed over to where the dog was laying and crouched down beside the blanket. “Hey, Gary. You want to go on an adventure with the nice man?”

“Gary?” Who the hell named their dog Gary? “His name’s _Gary_?”

The dog raised his head from where it had been resting on his paws, ears pricking forward, and looked at them. His tail didn’t wag and it looked like one of his eyes was a little lazy, but he was reacting to them now, which was an improvement.

“Never asked her where his name came from,” she said quietly. “I probably should’ve done that.”

“I’ll ask her parents when I get a hold of them,” Eddie offered quickly, hoping to prevent the impending downturn of the mood that he could sense looming on the horizon. “Let know you know what they say.”

From the half-smile she tipped his way, it worked. “Let’s hope it’s not because she was secretly a Gary Busey fan.”

Eddie snorted. “Poor dog. Nobody deserves that.”

Rising to her feet, Heather retrieved a moderate length of rope from the coffee table and brought it over. She coaxed Gary to his feet, tied one end of the rope through the ring on his collar, and handed the other to Eddie.

“Sorry I don’t have a real leash. It’s been a while since I had a dog.”

He shrugged that off. “Same for me. A _real_ long time.” And those weren’t memories he cared to revisit. “This’ll do fine until I get him back to my apartment.”

Gary was unsteady on his feet as he took a few tentative steps closer. Eddie was no expert on dogs, but to him, it looked like his hind legs were weak. Probably okay for navigating a house or the confines of a yard. Not so great for traveling miles across the city. _Shit. Now what are we going to do?_

The thought hadn’t been meant for Venom, but he heard it and answered anyway. **_It_** ** _’_** ** _s fine. I will fix it._**

“You’ll let me know how it goes?” Heather asked, glancing up from Gary to him. “He’s weird, but lovable. If they don’t want him, I’d be happy to take him.”

“You would?” Eddie smiled in relief. That was one less thing he’d have to worry about. “That’s good to know. Thank you. I’ll text you updates if you want. Keep you in the loop.”

She smiled widely, gratefully, as Venom grumbled something unintelligible in his mind. “I’d really appreciate it. Thank you.”

In an effort to stave off further disgruntlement, he kept the goodbyes as brief as he could and within a few minutes, they were walking out of the house. Gary pranced along at his side without any obvious difficulty despite the strangeness of his gait, not pulling ahead like dogs so often did while on walks with their owners. Eddie brought them to a stop when they reached the bike and discreetly looked around. There was nobody walking down the sidewalk on either side of the road and no cars.

“All right, ready to do this?”

**_Yes_**.

Reaching out, he placed his hand on Gary’s back. Venom rose to the surface of his skin and slithered down his arm. As his tendrils stretched out toward the dog, Eddie jokingly stole the last word. “Remember not to eat him on the way home.”

Unlike the last time they’d parted—Riot’s snarl echoing in their ears, claws in their flesh, tearing Venom away inch by precious inch—the transfer was fast and painless. One moment he could feel the symbiote’s presence in his mind and the next it was gone. _Everything_ was gone. Gary straightened up immediately, his back legs strengthening as Venom went to work repairing whatever damage had been done to his body. Eddie watched it happen, not really seeing it.

Because there was a gaping hole opening up inside of him, yawning wider with each breath he took and every too-quick beat of his heart. It was dizzily empty, like he was standing too close to the crumbling edge of a bottomless chasm. And cold. Achingly, icily cold.

Eddie had never felt anything like it. He was no stranger to loss, his entire life was a series of losses, each more devastating than the next. But this was so much worse. It _hurt_ , like his organs had been carved out of his body with a shard of broken glass and barbed wire had been used to stitch up what was left. And it was _wrong._ So very, very wrong. Like the fundamental laws of the universe had been shredded to nothing and replaced with incomprehensible nonsense.

His heart was pounding. He couldn’t catch his breath. His mind was filled with jagged static. The hollow wound inside of him was growing, devouring him as he stood there. He felt like he was going to start screaming, except his throat was so tight he couldn’t have forced sound out if he tried.

A sharp growl jerked him out of the terrifying spiral of emptiness and panic. Eddie blinked dry, scratchy eyes and saw Gary looking at him expectantly. He took a breath that felt shakier than it actually was and chanced a swallow that seemed to dissolve the rigidity from his body. The hollowness hadn’t disappeared, the icy ache in his bones hadn’t eased, but he could think again. He could breathe. His heart-rate was slowing back down to normal. It no longer felt like he was going to fracture into a million pieces.

_What the hell is wrong with me now?_ The thought seemed to echo through his mind, like a shout reverberating over and over again through a vast empty cavern. He didn’t like it.

“All right?” he asked, surprised to hear how steady and calm his voice sounded.

One of Gary’s ears twitched.

Unsure of what it meant, Eddie chose to assume it was an affirmative and nodded. “Okay. Well...” His limbs felt noodly, yet they worked just fine when he untied the rope from Gary’s collar, fished his keys out of his pocket, and got on the bike. “I’ll see you at home. Try not to eat anybody. Or get hit by a car.”

Lame joke, he knew, but he had to make it. Had to act like nothing was wrong and everything was fine because if he didn't, if he focused on it, he thought maybe he was going to lose his mind.

Gary turned and trotted off down the sidewalk with confident purpose, unusual stride now measured and easy like that of a normal dog. Eddie watched him go for a few seconds, until the nameless, formless thing welling up inside of him like a tidal wave got too overwhelming to bear. Almost convulsively jerking his wrist, he twisted the throttle a smidgen too hard and peeled off down the street.

It was the longest, paradoxically shortest, oddest, and most unpleasant ride he'd ever taken.  He was going too fast, weaving through evening traffic with a careless disregard for his safety. And it was stupid. So fucking stupid. Because he wasn't wearing a helmet and if he put the bike down, Venom wasn't there to heal him. One careless driver not paying attention or some gravel on the road and he might get himself killed. Eddie knew it, knew that he was behaving erratically, but common sense and what little remained of his self-preservation instinct took a backseat to the creeping horror of the unshakable _wrongness_ oozing through his veins like poison.

He just wanted to get home. Get home, get Venom back where he belonged, and together, maybe they could figure out what was going on with him.

Somehow, he managed to make it to his building without incident. He didn't know how. Couldn't really remember much of it once he was getting off the bike except for a hazy blur of lights and darkness and the chill of the air rushing over the exposed skin of his face. The familiar staircase leading up to his apartment seemed practically insurmountable from the bottom and by the time he trudged up to his floor, he felt a confusing, incompatible mixture of exhausted and wired. Like he'd been awake for forty-eight hours but had consumed too much caffeine to collapse. His hand was shaking so badly that he dropped the keys before he could get the door unlocked. It seemed to take an hour before he successfully fought his way inside.

Throwing his jacket and the leftovers he'd forgotten all about onto the counter, he took five steps toward the couch, intending to sit the hell down, then changed his mind and went to the window. A car drove by. A group of rowdy young men walked past hollering something unintelligible. But no dog. He drummed his fingers restlessly against the sides of his legs. That horrible wave of _something_ was rising up inside of him again, making his chest hurt and his throat ache.

Desperate for a distraction, Eddie pushed away from the window and did a circuit around the apartment. When that failed to reduce his restlessness or produce Venom and the dog, he did another. He carried his jacket over to the couch, tossed it down, picked up again on the next pass and sloppily hung it up with the rest of his clothes. Another circle brought him back through the kitchen, where he opened the plastic bag and dug out the contents. The foil-wrapped pile of meat got shoved unceremoniously into the refrigerator. The pile of chocolate bars he left sitting on the counter, carefully refusing to look too closely at them.

He drifted back to the window and peered out at the empty street and equally empty sidewalk. Empty. Empty. Empty.

Everything was empty.

Jerking back from the window, he fished his phone out of his pocket and turned it on. He tapped the contacts icon, then stood there uncertainly, thumb hovering over Anne's name. The weak, pathetic part of him wanted to call her, wanted to hear her voice break the intolerable silence of the apartment, but the rest of him—his pride, his common sense, the insidious understanding that hearing her voice was just going to make everything worse—recoiled so violently at the idea that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. After a long, insufferable moment of indecision, Eddie sighed and slid the phone back into his pocket. He checked his watch, not entirely sure how long it had actually been.

Too long. That was all he knew. Too fucking long.

Abruptly, Eddie spun around, already halfway to the door by the time he registered that he'd heard something scratching against it. He didn't bother checking through the peephole, just wrenched the knob so hard that he probably would have tore it off if he'd still had the alien-augmented strength, and yanked the door open. The German Shepherd stood there with ears pricked, looking up at him with far too intelligent eyes.

The dark, terrible thing that had a stranglehold on Eddie's mind and body slowly uncoiled.

"Starting to think you'd gotten run over," he quipped as he stepped out of the way, injecting levity into his voice that he still couldn't relax enough to feel.

Growling softly, Gary padded past him into the apartment. Eddie shut the door and turned around, absently rubbing his palms against his jeans. The dog was sitting there a few feet away, watching him.

"Can you..." He wanted to hold out his hand, demand that Venom return to him immediately, but something held him back. Pride, probably, refusing to be that openly needy. Plus, he was genuinely curious. Eddie cleared his throat and gave Gary a weak half-smile. "Can you do the thing?" He waved his hand vaguely at him. "With the dog?"

Gary cocked his head, obviously a gesture of curiosity.

"You know." Eddie waved at himself this time. "Like you do with me. When we're _us._ " Nothing outwardly changed on the dog, but he got the distinct sense that Venom was judging him. He shrugged. "I'm just curious what it would look like."

One side of Gary's upper lip twitched, like he was going to bare his teeth at him. Then the darkness bubbled up and spread out across his skin, molding his body into something larger and bulkier and monstrous, with wickedly sharp claws for toenails, a spiky tail, and muzzle that bristled with enormous, nasty looking teeth. His mouth parted and his tongue lolled out, significantly longer than that of an ordinary dog. But the eyes, pearlescent and curling upward unnaturally, were the same alien eyes that Eddie had seen in the mirror so many times.

Unconsciously, Eddie drifted closer until he could run a hand over Gary's back. The black substance that made up Venom's body felt the same as it did on him, smooth and warm. He didn't know if he'd been expecting that or not. It pooled around his fingers, rippling over them, and slid up along his arm. As it moved over and into him, it receded from the dog—fur sprouted in the wake of the darkness as muscle and bone reshaped itself into something natural and recognizable—until Gary was back to normal. Until Venom was securely lodged in Eddie's body, blanketing his mind, flowing through his veins, tangled around his organs.  

And just like that, he could breathe again. Think again. He was whole and complete. He felt _normal_ again.

The relief that surged through him was so strong it nearly made him lightheaded. Taking a step sideways, Eddie felt his hip fetch up against the center island and leaned heavily against it, scrubbing his hand over his face. It would've been easy, and comfortably avoidant, to pretend that it was coming from Venom. But he knew it wasn't, and as much as he wasn't ready to confront anything remotely related to his own feelings, he couldn't muster up the denial necessary to feign ignorance.   

Gary moved closer, evidently no longer quite so indifferent to human company, and nudged his nose into the hand hanging limply at his side. Eddie idly scratched the top of his head, not really paying attention to what he was doing.

**_Eddie?_ **

That single word was like having a life-preserver flung his way while treading water in the middle of the ocean. He wanted to lunge for it and hang on lest it disappear and leave him to drown. But that was embarrassingly desperate and pathetic and above all, _stupid_. He forced himself not to react to it.

"Hmm?" he hummed casually. Or what he hoped was casually.

**_What is it?_ **

Playing dumb never worked unless Venom was willing to humor him, but right then, it was automatic. "What?"

**_Wrong. Something is wrong._ **

Trying to tell himself to be cool without actually thinking words that might be overheard, he twitched his shoulder in a half-assed shrug. "That took longer than I thought it would."

**_The dog was damaged. It took time to fix it._ **

Of its own volition, his gaze drifted down to Gary. His tail was wagging slowly back and forth. Neither eye looked lazy anymore. It was rather impressive, actually, and in a better frame of mind, he would have asked about it. Inquired if it was possible for Venom, and symbiotes in general, to heal any body of injury or disease. But he was too distracted, torn between acting like everything was fine, admitting that everything had _not_ been fine, and pestering for details of whatever his other had found in Gary’s mind.

“What was—”

**_Tension_** , Venom interrupted. **_Disquiet. Sadness._**

For a few seconds, Eddie contemplated feigning confusion, but he knew that that would just prolong a discussion he didn’t want to have in the first place. “It’s nothing, man. Don’t worry about it.”

**_No secrets, Eddie._ **

Even with his emotional equilibrium shot to hell, the hypocrisy of that mild rebuke was as infuriating as it was exhausting. Having had enough of the rollercoaster for one night, Eddie listed toward the latter. “It’s not a secret.” He heaved a weary sigh. “It’s just—It doesn’t matter anymore. We don’t have to talk about it.”

**_Yes we do._ **

“No, we really don’t. It’s stupid.”

A low, agreeable hum reverberated through his mind. **_You are often irrational._**

“Gee, thank pal,” Eddie returned sarcastically, glowering at a point somewhere between the wall and the dog.

There was no logical reason to feel as raw and uncomfortable as he did. Venom had come back. And it wasn’t like they’d never been separated before. _But it_ _’_ _s different now, isn_ _’_ _t it?_ Which, _okay_ , he knew it was different. He’d been dying the first time; that, the abduction, and subsequent bullshit with Treece, Drake, and Riot had occupied the entirety of his attention. Then he’d been fighting, _they_ _’_ _d_ been fighting, for their lives, for the planet, for every living thing on it. There hadn’t been time to examine the whys and wherefores of how he’d been feeling about the whole mess. 

_That_ _’_ _s not it and you know it, Brock._ Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it had nothing to do with the Life Foundation shit and everything to do with the fact that since the explosion, they’d spent weeks together with nothing forcing them to part from one another. Maybe it was easier to separate after only two days than it was to do it after nearly a month. Though if that was the case, how much harder would it be after two? After six? After a year? Would he be able to handle it or would it drive him insane?

Would Venom even stay with him that long?

An undesirable conversation was infinitely preferable to thinking about that or worse, what he would do if the answer was no. Hastily pulling his thoughts back into less turbulent waters, Eddie offered a lame, albeit honest, answer to the original question. “I just—I thought it would be easy. Quick info grab from the dog’s mind, you know? But it, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t like it. It felt— _I_ felt wrong. And I…” He shook his head, running out of words to describe it. “I don’t know.” 

**_You feared I would not come back._ **

That cut a little too close for comfort. “No, I knew you’d come back.” He wrinkled his nose, snorting in disbelief. “Of course you were coming back. It’s a dog. You weren’t going to bond with a dog. But...”

**_No dog. No human. No one else._ ** **You _are my host._**

“Yeah, I know.” Venom had said it often enough, hadn’t he? “I do. I know.”

It might’ve been fanciful thinking, but he could’ve sworn that he felt the symbiote moving around inside him, curling around his spine, winding in and out between his organs, spinning a web that encased every molecule of his body. **_Mine, Eddie._ Mine. _Always._**

Always. It was such romanticized nonsense. Nothing lasted forever. Nobody stayed together. Lovers parted. Friendships shattered. Time and death and distance eroded even the strongest of bonds. Eddie knew that firsthand, had witnessed everyone he had ever cared about pass in and out of his life like water through a tightly clenched fist. He knew that he couldn't trust it now, however well-meaning and earnest Venom's assertion.

Things changed. Life happened. Not even aliens could predict the future. Yet some hopelessly stupid part of him still yearned to believe it.

**_Mine_** , Venom repeated, in a growl so low that it rumbled in his bones.

Whatever the future held, in the moment, his other meant it. That, at least, Eddie knew for certain. And that was a balm that soothed some of the rawness of their temporary separation.

He smiled a little, a quick quirk of his lips. "At the risk of saying something really corny and completely played out, I'll just, uh, say that..." He floundered, not sure where he was going with it. Not sure if he dared to venture where he knew it must inevitably go.

With the faintest ghost of a touch, Venom dipped into his memories. **_Show me the money!_**

It was so unexpected and patently absurd that Eddie couldn't help but laugh. Genuine, thoroughly amused laughter loud enough to make Gary cock his head at him. "Close, buddy."

He was still chuckling under his breath when the apartment melted into darkness. Deep, impenetrable black the likes of which he had never seen before. His throat closed as his body froze in the beginnings of terror. Until the black spun and spiraled out and away into a darkness speckled with pinpricks of light. White light, blue light, flickers of reds and oranges that morphed into stars. Stars twisted and swirled into planets of hues his mind struggled and failed to name, became nebulae and galaxies that flowed over and around him until distance lost any hope of meaning and became an endless stretch of time so vast he couldn't comprehend it.

Until the rush of light and color slowed and spun and spiraled into a shape he'd seen in photos and computer-generated projections. He sank into it, through a curtain of stars and shattered remains of worlds lost before his own was formed, and hurled through the dark to a tiny, unremarkable sphere of blue and brown and white.

The vision faded, funneling inward like a drop cloth tugged away from a canvas, revealing the shabby old apartment underneath.

**_My kind can join with many hosts_** , Venom told him, while his mind reeled with what he'd just seen. **_Must do this to travel beyond our world and communicate with others. But for each of us, there is only one. And the universe is endless. So many lives spread so far apart. Most of my kind will never know a true bond. Never be whole._**

Venom's memory, Eddie realized then. That was what it was. A brief glimpse into his other's journey across space. Every incredible thing he'd just seen, the all-encompassing sense of the infinite, the colors for which he had no name, it had all been _real_. Somehow, that was nearly more staggering than actually seeing it.

"Gimme a sec, man," he murmured, rubbing at his face. "That was— _Shit_ , that was intense. Is that really what you saw?"

**_Yes. Some of it._ **

Some of it, he said, like it wasn't the most amazing, breathtaking thing Eddie had ever seen. Like it was so mundane that it was practically beneath his notice. It hit him then, _truly_ hit him, so hard that it felt as though the air had just been punched from his lungs, that Venom was an alien. He'd known that since the incident at the Life Foundation, of course. The things that had happened to him and the reality of Venom's everything had made that crystal clear. But there'd been so much going on that he'd never thoroughly processed it. He'd gotten swept up in a current of crazy, impossible shit and yeah, he'd freaked out there for a while, but mostly he'd just gone with it. And once he'd gotten far enough downstream, he'd kept going, largely content to float along and see where it took him.

It was only now, standing in his kitchen, barely able to catch his breath as the enormity of it all came crashing over him, that it really, finally sank in.

Venom was a fucking alien. 

An alien from a planet so far away that it had taken it god only knew how long to reach Earth. A living, maybe not breathing, conscious being with thoughts and feelings and a lifetime that might very well have been longer than Eddie's crappy little planet had even existed. It had seen things Eddie couldn't even comprehend, things that he'd only glimpsed in TV shows and movies like _Star Trek_ and _Alien_ and hell, probably _Starship Troopers_.

And this thing, this ancient, unbelievable, incredible thing had come to Earth and slithered into his body and decided that that was it. It was going to stay. Earth was going to be its home because some random, ordinary, painfully average guy with absolutely nothing remarkable or interesting about him whatsoever was its fucking soulmate.

**_Yes!_** Apparently Venom appreciated that analogy. Or maybe he was just relieved that Eddie was finally getting a goddamn clue. ** _I traveled a long way to find you, Eddie. You are mine and I am yours. You have always been mine. And together, we are whole._**

"Holy shit." He pushed away from the island and staggered over to the couch, Gary trailing along in his wake. "I think I need to sit down."

Collapsing onto the end of it, he let his head drop back and stared blankly at the water-spotted ceiling. The couch shook slightly as the dog jumped up onto it and laid down next to him. He could feel Gary staring at him, knew that he probably ought to go get him a bowl of water and something to eat. There wasn't any dog food in the place, but maybe some of the leftover steak from dinner could do in a pinch.

**_No!_** Or not. **_Go to the store. Won't share._**

He laughed. He couldn't help it. It just snuck out of him on his next exhale. "I know, man. Believe me, _I know_."

Satisfaction oozed through him. **_Do you understand now?_**

"I don't... I mean, I guess?" Eddie opened his hands helplessly. "Sort of. But also, not really. There's like what, almost eight billion people on the planet. Why me? What makes _me_ so special?"

Venom seemed to consider that for a moment. Then, with the calm sagacity of something infinitely older and more intelligent than him, his other said definitively, **_You're mine._**

Despite himself, Eddie chuckled. "That simple, huh?"

**_Yes._ **

_Hell, maybe it is._ It wasn't like he had any family to speak of that might try to lay a counterclaim on him. His mother was long dead. His father had disowned him. He’d been estranged from his sister when she’d died from cancer and it had been only a year or so ago that he'd accidentally stumbled onto the knowledge that he had a younger half-brother. His fiancé had left him. If family was ultimately whatever one made of it, why not an alien? Looking back on everything that had happened to him over the decades, it sure seemed like life was setting him up for this.

Unable to think of a good follow-up to that assertion, Eddie gave in to the urgings of curiosity. "How old are you, anyway?"

**_Not sure. Very old. Difficult to estimate using human years._ **

_Guess it goes to show that age really is only a number._ For all that he was apparently incomprehensibly old, Venom acted like a childish brat more often than he didn't. Eddie felt the corner of his mouth pulling upward in a smile. _Maybe that's why we get along so well._

"Did you find anything?" Now that whatever weird crisis he'd been having was mostly over, it was time to get back to business. "With Gary."

**_Yes._** Was that... He couldn't quite get a read off of the emotion coming from Venom. Uncertainty? Reluctance? Confusion? **_Don't know if it'll help._**

That sounded ominous. "What is it?"

The apartment disappeared again. In its place was a strange-hued view of a backyard. Yellowish-grey grass rolled down a hill toward a muddy-colored fence. Beyond it, visible due to the slope of the land, was the next street. There was a tree down near the fence, gently losing its leaves. A bird called from the midst of its crown, the sound as clear to Eddie as if he was actually standing there listening to it. But more attention-grabbing than even the clarity of the notes were the smells. There were so many, pungent and sweet and sour, that it was almost impossible to concentrate on anything else.

Until one suddenly stood out from the rest: acrid, sharp, and above all, _dangerous._ The image jerked sideways, momentarily creating a blur of yellow and blue, and there across the street, stepping out of the alleyway onto the sidewalk, just for an instant before the perspective hurled forward and the sight of it was obscured by the fence, he glimpsed—

"Is that..." Eddie blinked, the memory dissolving back into the more colorful reality of papers scattered on his coffee table and the TV remote halfway to disappearing underneath it. "That was a costume, right? Some kind of mask? Helmet?"

**_That is what the dog saw._ **

He looked doubtfully at Gary, who was licking at his paw and paying no attention to him whatsoever. "You're sure?"

**_Yes._ **

"...Okay." He'd only see it for a second in the dog's memory, but the sheer oddity of it had branded the image in his own. "I'll, I don't know. Ask around, I guess. See if anyone's seen a..." Christ, he felt stupid saying it out loud. "A pumpkin-headed person."

It _had_ to be a costume. It was October, after all. Halloween was in two weeks and plenty of people liked the holiday enough to get the proverbial party started early. Unless the human-shaped figure with the enormous pumpkin-looking thing where its head should have been was an alien, it couldn't be anything else.

"You haven't run into any aliens with pumpkin-shaped heads, have you?"

**_No._ **

"How about that smell? Was that significant, do you think? Or was it just a normal thing a dog..." He trailed off as the disorienting, dizzying realization that he had just _been inside a dog's brain_ hit him with all the subtlety of an avalanche _._ By proxy, of course, but unless there were other symbiotes hidden among the human populace, no one else on the planet had ever literally been inside a dog's head. "Oh my god."

**_Breathe, Eddie_**. From the dryly amused tone, Venom thought he was being an idiot.

"But it's—Do you have any idea how many people would kill to be able to do what you just did?" Right sentiment, wrong words for his target audience. Wincing, he tried again. "Figuratively speaking. Probably. I just—Jesus. It's incredible. What you can do."

**_What_** **we _can do_** , came the automatic correction. But it sounded like Venom was preening a little. The Klyntar equivalent, anyway.

"I don't know, man. I'm pretty sure it's all you."

**_Compliments will not make me forget your promise of Tastykakes_**.

How something so amazing could simultaneously be so ridiculous was likely beyond his ability to ever understand. "I didn't forget either!" he protested, rolling his eyes. "We gotta go get dog food in a few minutes. We can get them then."

**_Now. Let_ ** **_’_ ** **_s go now._ **

“All right, fine.” Pushing himself up off the couch, he checked his watch. “Might as well just go to the Safeway.” It was open until midnight. He wouldn’t be keeping anyone from going home if he sauntered in there so late in the evening. “You’ll be okay here by yourself, right?” he asked Garry, turning to lay a quelling hand on him when he started to rise too. “Don’t like, shred the sofa or piss all over. Please.”

**_It will be fine. Move. Get food._ **

Eddie let himself be chivvied out the door with only a minimal amount of reluctant uncertainty. He absolutely could not afford to replace the furniture in his apartment if the dog destroyed it while he was gone, which Venom well knew, but his other wasn’t worried about it. Knowing that that lack of concern likely stemmed from a refusal to waste energy assigning importance to human concepts of currency, Eddie nevertheless decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’d been inside the dog. If Venom was confident that Gary wouldn’t trash the place for whatever reason, the least he could do was extend a little trust.

Worst case scenario, they’d get back to a disaster and he’d learn not to be so gullible again.

The trip to the store was as uneventful as the first part of the night hadn’t been. Safeway wasn’t crowded and Venom, evidently on his best behavior for once, didn’t cause an unnecessary scene about anything. Eddie picked up a cheap leash, a small bag of large breed dog food, and three family-sized boxes of tiny chocolate donuts. They returned home within an hour and found Gary where they’d left him, curled up in a ball on the sofa.

“You want those leftover steaks now?” Eddie asked as he dug two large bowls out of the cabinets. “Or are you gonna save them for tomorrow?”

There was a moment of silence as Venom decided. **_Steak tomorrow. Donuts now._**

Eyebrows shooting up at that impressive show of restraint, Eddie whistled. “Did not see that coming,” he admitted, turning to put the bowls onto the island. Once his hands were free, he tore open the bag of food and, not knowing how much Gary ate, filled one of them up to the brim. “I’m impr—”

**_What is this?_** A tendril curled out of his side and nudged the pile of chocolate bars sitting nearby.

“Oh. That’s for you. From Anne.” Eddie set the bowl of food onto the floor next to the island, then went to fill the other with water. “Your surprise. Sorry. I forgot all about it during the, uh... commotion.”

A faint sense of satisfaction rumbled through him. **_You were unhappy without me._**

“No shit, Sherlock.”

_Smug symbiotes_ , he thought in mock exasperation, as he deposited the water bowl next to the food on his way into the living room. _Can_ _’_ _t live with them. Can_ _’_ _t live without them._ And thanks to that taste of it earlier, Eddie had quietly made peace with the fact that he didn’t want to do the latter.

He roused the dog from the couch, clipped the new leash on him, and led him over to the bowls. Gary took a few half-hearted licks of water, sniffed the food, and looked up at Eddie in a way that was clearly questioning. Not willing to gamble with the cleanliness of his apartment, he figured it would be a good idea to take him outside before bed.

“You want to grab some donuts for the road while I take Gary for a quick walk?”

Venom responded to that question by manifesting half a dozen tendrils, ripping the lid off one of the boxes of Tastykakes, and scooping out all of the donuts. Another tendril took shape on his shoulder and from the corner of his eye, he saw it shift into his other’s face.

“Just don’t chew in my ear,” Eddie warned him. “And hide if you hear someone coming.”

There weren’t any nearby patches of grass, so they stayed in the alley out behind the building. It was dark back there and only tended to see foot traffic during the daylight hours. Eddie walked Gary back and forth along the length of it a few times as Venom tossed one donut after another into his gaping maw. The dog finally peed on the third repetition, and when he refused to do anything further by the fifth, Eddie called it a night and went back inside.

It was still relatively early, at least by the standards of the hours he normally kept, but the emotional rollercoaster of the past few hours made it feel like he’d been awake for days. And while it wasn’t terribly late for him, it was for the rest of the world. He couldn’t call anyone about the dog: the detectives in charge of the case who likely had the family's contact information had probably gone home and even if he had the number, he couldn’t very well call now.

As far as the strange figure went, Eddie had no idea what the hell to do about it. He couldn’t take it to the police. They’d want to know how he came by the information and there was no way to frame it that wouldn’t sound questionable at best or downright crazy at worst. Maybe he could ask around a little, talk to the people that lived on that other street around where the dog had seen the thing, but he didn’t have much to go on. A human-shaped figure of indeterminate height that had a big pumpkin where its head ought to be, might have been wearing a cape, and smelled dangerous, like fire and blood and death. Yeah. He’d be drowning in leads with that.

Putting the whole mess off until morning seemed like the best bet all around. He was more likely to have success on the dog front if he waited until then and it was possible, however unlikely, that he’d have a brilliant idea while he was sleeping that would take care of the murderer situation.

Eddie dug an old blanket out of a storage container and did his best to make a bed on the couch with it for Gary. When he was satisfied with his sloppy handiwork, he did Future Eddie a solid and spent a couple minutes tidying up the kitchen so it wouldn’t be a wreck for making breakfast in the morning. Afterward, he took a shower, threw on his pajamas, did the rounds turning off the lights, gave Gary a goodnight pat on the head, and crawled into bed. He was so wrung out that the instant his head hit the pillow, drowsiness swept over him.

**_Eddie._ **

“Hmm?” he mumbled, hoping that Venom wasn’t about to engage him in a protracted conversation.

**_Don_ ** **_’_ ** **_t sleep yet. Not before the make-up sex._ **

He was too tired to find that misunderstanding of the phrase as amusing and endearing as he might have otherwise done. “Can’t have make-up sex, buddy. That’s for after fights. We weren’t fighting.”

**_What is it called then?_ **

“There isn’t—We don’t have a word for sex with our symbiotes after a separation. Uh, you know, because that’s a, a uniquely _us_ situation.”

Something large and heavy sank onto the mattress next to him. Startled, Eddie opened his eyes and started to sit up, mind full of wild, half-formed images of Venom doing fuck only knew what weird shit. But it wasn’t a roiling mass of extraterrestrial substance forming into a person or a mass of tendrils or anything equally bizarre. It was Gary, evidently unsatisfied with the couch, flopping down and pressing in against him.

**_Would you like me to form a large_ ** **_—_ **

“ _No!_ ” Eddie said loudly, cutting him off before he could finish the question. Gary started to sit up, but he quelled that motion by stroking his palm soothingly over the dog’s head. “It’s okay, Gary. That wasn’t directed at you.”

**_But you thought_ ** **_—_ **

“I think a lot of things. Most of the time, I’m not doing it on purpose.” He slumped back down and made himself comfortable. “Can we take a raincheck on the sex thing? I can’t—Gary’s right here. It’d be weird to do it in front of him.”

**_Gary doesn_ ** **_’_ ** **_t care. He_ ** **_’_ ** **_s going to sleep._ **

“Yeah but _I_ care. Sex is a private thing. An us only kind of thing.”

He meant it, too. It wasn’t an excuse. One embarrassing mishap with Mr. Belvedere during an intimate moment with Anne had been all it had taken to ensure that shutting the cat out of the bedroom was a requirement to all further sexual escapades. There was no way he was going to get freaky with an alien in front of a dog. Especially after he’d sort of been inside the dog’s head.

Luckily, Venom’s innate possessiveness appreciated the distinction enough to make it a non-issue. **_I will accept this_** ** _…_** ** _raincheck?_**

“Agreement to do a thing later that we can’t do now. It’s a figure of speech. Comes from a sports thing. You really want to get into the history of the word, we’ll do that tomorrow too, okay?”

**_All right._ **

* * *

Getting in touch with Autumn Alberts’ family was surprisingly easy. Eddie had expected a hassle somewhere in the process, but the detective he spoke with accepted the story of reuniting the dog with the family without question or suspicion and provided numbers where they could be reached. Autumn’s father, Ben, answered the phone on the first try and reacted to the news that Gary had been found with enthusiasm and joy. He and his wife definitely wanted him and after Eddie gave him his address, promised to be there within the hour.

It wasn’t enough time to get started on the pumpkin-head problem, so Eddie took Gary out to the alley to do his business. Afterward, they hung out on the couch until a knock at the door heralded Ben’s arrival. It was clear as soon as he opened the door that Gary recognized the guy.

Tail wagging furiously, Gary began leaping around them both. He jumped up on Ben, around in him circles when he got pushed down, and once, up on Eddie, who just laughed and let Venom prevent him from taking an ungainly spill.

Eventually, they got the dog settled enough for Ben to clip the leash on him. Eddie handed over the food, and after a brief conversation—heartfelt thanks for reuniting them with their last link to their daughter, an inquiry into the origins of the dog’s name, Eddie’s phone number in case the family needed anything else, and his solemn promise that he was doing everything he could to help the police with their investigation—Gary and his new owner departed. He hung around in the doorway until they disappeared down the stairs at the end of the hallway, then stepped back inside and shut the door.

“Well, I guess that’s one job finished,” he said, surveying the apartment’s state in the aftermath of his canine guest.

The bowls needed washed and put away. The blanket needed washed, which meant he probably ought to get a full load of laundry together so he didn’t waste money and detergent on one thing. The detritus from breakfast needed cleaned up: dishes and pans needed washed, the pieces of the empty donut box needed collected and thrown away.

And when the chores were done, he needed to text Heather and Anne about how things had gone with Gary. Then, he was going to have to spend a little time on the computer to see if he could find anything that might make explaining Gary’s memory easier. A costume reminiscent of whatever the guy—or maybe a woman; even though serial killers were usually men, it would’ve been irresponsible of him to completely rule out the possibility that it was a woman—had looked to have been wearing. The mask. Weird sightings on conspiracy theory websites about pumpkin-headed aliens. Whatever. Anything that might help.

**_Eddie._ **

“Yeah?”

**_We are alone. Redeem the check._ **

“Check? For—You mean sex?” He wasn’t sure why he was surprised. It wasn’t the first time Venom had hauled some random comment made in the past into the present and expected him to instantly know what he meant. “Right now?”

**_Yes._ **

“That’s awfully—I mean, usually there’s a little seduction first, you know?” Blunt approach or not, Eddie couldn’t deny that he felt the faint stir of arousal at the declaration. “Show me a good time first.”

The reference was lost on him. **_I will show you a good time_ now.**

_Hell, who_ _’_ _m I kidding?_ “All right.” He spread his arms wide. “I’m all yours. What are you going to do with me?”

The dark, velvety growl tingled down his spine and made his skin prickle. **_Everything._**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates are going to slow down in December. I'm writing some short Christmas stories (of which one, possibly two, are Venom-related) and I won't have as much time to devote to working on my ongoing stories as I'd like. Updates will resume the weekly/biweekly schedule in January. 
> 
> If you'd like scheduling updates and whatnot, check out my [Twitter](https://twitter.com/griffonfarm) and [Tumblr](http://griffonfarm.tumblr.com/). I post stuff there fairly regularly.

**Author's Note:**

> This was going to be part of the Seasonal Shorts collection for Halloween, but it grew too much of a plot to be considered a "short" story. 
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://griffonfarm.tumblr.com/).


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